INTEGRATED SERVICE ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORK (ISAF)
FOR ITIL V3
Akbar Nabiollahi
Faculty of Computer science
and Information System
University Teknologi
Malaysia
81310, Skudai, Johor
nabi_ir@yahoo.com
Rose Alinda Alias
Faculty of Computer science
and Information System
University Teknologi
Malaysia
81310, Skudai, Johor
Rose@utm.my
ABSTRACT
Shamsul Sahibuddin
Faculty of Computer science
and Information System
University Teknologi
Malaysia
81310, Skudai, Johor
shamsul@utm.my
1. INTRODUCTION
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
and Enterprise Architecture (EA) are both managerial
frameworks, but they address different concerns. While ITIL
is primarily focused on the IT service management, EA
focuses on developing required architectures for defining
priorities and projects of IS and IT for short, mid and long
term in an enterprise.
In spite of some different goals for them, there are
several common benefits and components which raise the
issues of relationship and integration of these two areas.
Enterprise Architecture is a framework for designing
architectures and plans of IS and IT projects in an
organization and aims to align business objectives with IT
objectives. ITIL V3 as a public framework and a set of
guidelines for IT service management (ITSM) also plans to
align IT investments with business objectives through IT
Governance. This research attempts to integrate EA
framework into ITIL in order to design Integrated Service
Architecture Framework (ISAF) for Service Design stage
requirements of IT service lifecycle.
ISAF for IT services will facilitate and standardize
utilization of EA in ITIL V3. Researcher believes conducting
this research will have an important contribution to bridging
computing and information system disciplines due to serviceoriented technology and management aspects of the
research. In addition, ISAF will extend EA framework with a
new layer as service architecture layer which is one of
concerns of EA practitioners for using service concepts in
EA.
1.1 Enterprise Architecture
An Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a set of business and
engineering models, including text and graphical
documentations that describes and guides the operation of
enterprise-wide systems [7].
It is generally accepted in academic [4] and applied [5]
researches that EA can be decomposed into EA layers in
order to have a model for representing and demonstrating
Enterprise Architecture. This model also shows layers of
architectures that each organization should develop. Based
on [7] these layers for EA can be more general and
acceptable:
•
Business Architectures is the result of defining the
business strategies, processes and functional
requirements.
•
Information Architecture describes the required
logical data for business requirements and management
of data resources.
•
Application Architecture is focused on developing and
implementing applications to fulfill business
requirements.
•
Technical (Infrastructure) Architecture provides the
foundation that supports the application, information
and business processes.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6 [Management Of Computing And Information
Systems]
D.2.11 [Software Architecture]
General Terms
IT Service Management, Service Design, IT Governance,
Keywords
ITIL, Enterprise Architecture, Service Design, Service
Lifecycle.
517
•
Continual Service Improvement: This volume
provides instrumental guidance in creating and
maintaining value for customers through better
design, introduction, and operation of services. It
combines principles, practices, and methods from
quality management, Change Management and
capability improvement [2].
As a simple comparison, ITIL V2 was focused on Service
Delivery and Service Support but V3, as mentioned above, is
concentrated on service lifecycle which is a comprehensive
solution for IT Services. However, Service Strategy and
Service Design are new stages that ITIL V3 has considered
to resolve major weaknesses of ITIL V2. In this paper the
focus is on Service Design to consider it as a main point to
integrate ITIL and Enterprise Architecture.
1.2 ITIL V3
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has
been introduced with Office of Government Commerce
(OGC). After about ten years using of ITIL V2, ITIL V3 was
introduced by OGC in 2007. The primary goal of ITIL is to
provide a framework and a good practice in IT service
management. Opposed to ITIL V2 which is focused on IT
service delivery and support, ITIL V3 is concentrated on
Service lifecycle management (figure 1).
2. BACKGROUND OF RESEARCH
2.1 Integration of IT Service Management
into EA
Prior to publication of ITIL V3 (in March 2007), one
research have been conducted on integration of ITIL V2 and
EA. Braun and Winter(2007) have proposed an enterprise
architecture expansion which integrates IT service
management (ITIL), service orientated architecture (SOA).
In this paper, authors (Braun and Winter 2007) have
focused on when EA is considered as pivotal concept for
organization and ITSM is introduced as a dominant model
for enterprise, so ITSM here was integrated into EA. Thus, a
meta model was introduced to cover EA components as it
can support IT services. This model integrates five essential
layers of an EA framework (including business architecture,
process architecture, application architecture, software
architecture and technology architecture) with IT service as a
new view for presenting IT service management in the EA
model.
Braun and Winter, finally have mentioned that based on
importance of EA for organizational engineering and the
increasing importance of service orientation in IT
Management, their paper aimed at integrating ITSM and
SOA into EA.(Braun and Winter 2007)
Figure 1. ITIL V3: Service Life Cycle [1]
The ITIL books consist of five publications:
•
Service Strategy: This volume provides guidance
on how to design, develop, and implement service
management as an organizational capability and as a
strategic asset. Guidance is provided on the
principles and processes which considering the
practice of service management are useful for
developing service management policies, guidelines
and processes across the ITIL Service Lifecycle[1].
•
Service Design: According to Service Design
volume of ITIL V3 [3], this publication provides
guidance for the design and development of services
and service management processes. It covers design
principles and methods for converting strategic
objectives into portfolios of services and service
assets.
•
Service Transition: This volume provides guidance
for the development and improvement of
capabilities for transitioning new and changed
services into operations. [1].
•
Service Operation: This volume embodies
practices in the management of service operations. It
includes guidance on achieving effectiveness and
efficiency in the delivery and support of services to
deliver
value for both customer and service
provider[2]
2.2 Service Design in ITIL V3
As mentioned in subsection 1.2, one of the publications
of ITIL V3 is Service Design. In this volume, OGC suggests
an approach to apply Enterprise Architecture in Service
Design. In the following subsections we will review this
idea.
Service Design is a stage within the overall service
lifecycle and an important element within the business
change process. OGC defines the role of Service Design
within the business change process as [3]:
The design of appropriate and innovative IT
services, including their architectures, processes,
policies and documentation, to meet current and
future agreed business requirements.
518
Some of main goals and objectives of Service Design are
to [2]:
•
design services to meet agreed business outcomes
•
design processes to support the service lifecycle
•
design secure and resilient IT infrastructures,
environments, applications and data/information
resources and capability
•
produce and maintain plans, processes, policies,
standards, architectures, frameworks and documents to
support the design of quality IT solutions
It can be seen these goals of Service Design covers some
objectives of Enterprise Architecture. The third goal states
that design, developing and delivery of any IT service should
lead us to prepare or produce required infrastructure,
environment, applications and data/information resources.
The fourth one focuses on designing, documenting and
maintaining IT solutions (including plans, standards,
architectures, frameworks and documents) which is one of
the most important goals of Enterprise Architecture.
Figure 2- ITIL V3: Service Life cycle Outputs [2]
Service Design stage begins with a set of business
requirements, and ends with the development of a service
solution designed to meet documented business requirements
and outcomes and to provide a Service Design Package
(SDP) for handover into Service Transition (figure 2). Four
individual aspects of Service Design are defined as
following:
•
new or changed service solutions
•
service management systems and tools, especially the
Service Portfolio
•
technology architectures and management systems
processes, roles and capabilities
•
measurement methods and metrics
2.3 Enterprise Architecture in Service Design
We discussed major issues of Service Design (SD), but
main discussion of us is about relationship of EA and ITIL
therefore in this section we will focus on Enterprise
Architecture in Service Design and will discuss on our
important finding regard to this issue.
In Service Design volume, OGC [3], has listed the
deliverables of SD and one of these outputs called as
“Technology architecture and management”. Based on this
aspect of design and under the subsection of “Designing
technology architecture”, the writer defines Architecture
Design as:
The development of IT policies, strategies,
architectures, designs, documents, plans and
processes for the development and subsequent
operation and improvement of appropriate IT
services and solutions throughout an organization.
OGC [3] mentioned that all of these components should
cover all aspects of IT including services, technology,
architectures and frameworks, processes and methods. All
areas of technology included infrastructure, applications and
data must be covered by architectural design.
Then OGC relates architectural design with Enterprise
Architecture and lists names of the most important
frameworks of EA. The relationship of EA that is figured by
ITIL V3, stated below:
An EA should show how all components of an enterprise
are integrated in order to achieve the business
objectives, both now and in the future…
The complete EA can be large and complex so here we
are interested in those architectures concerned with the
business of the organization and the information
systems that support it.
OGC suggested that EA should be an integrated element
of the Business Architecture and should include the
following major areas (Figure 3):
As it can be seen, one of these aspects, technology
architecture which is emphasized in service design, is part of
EA concerns and deliverables. In addition, based on the
figure 2, another important finding is the outputs of Service
design which includes “Solution Design, Architectures,
Standards and SDPs”. Here we notify that Service Design
should produce some parts of outputs of Enterprise
Architecture.
Service Design Package (SDP) defines all aspects of an
IT service and its requirements through each stage of its
lifecycle. An SDP is produced for each new IT service,
major change, or IT service retirement [2].
519
•
Service
Architecture
translates
applications,
infrastructure, organization and support activities into a
set of services.
•
Application Architecture provides a blueprint for the
development and deployment of applications, maps
business and functional requirements on to applications
and shows the interrelationship between applications.
•
Data/Information Architecture describes the logical
and physical data assets of the enterprise and the data
management resources.
ITIL is an important and influential center of gravity in IT
management [8]. As discussed earlier, ITIL V2 was
published in mid ninety and has been applied in more than
one decade. It mainly was focused on Service Delivery and
Service Support and has not covered service strategy and
service design. Recently, in 2007, ITIL V3 was released by
OGC. In this version of ITIL, the focus is on Service
lifecycle which means service needs a lifecycle from
initiation trough retirement and it should be managed and
controlled through whole lifecycle. This lifecycle includes
five stages: Service strategy, Service Design, Service
Transition, Service operation and Continual Service
Improvement.
Although there are few efforts on relationship of ITIL V2
and Enterprise architecture such as “Integration of IT Service
Management into Enterprise Architecture”[6] which
mentioned earlier, all of them are developed based on ITIL
V2.
Regard to previous discussion on Service Design phase of IT
service lifecycle for ITIL V3, we need an integrated
framework to develop service architecture of IT services. It
means for designing IT service in service lifecycle, service
architecture should be developed. This architecture integrates
all information related to service design. This information
includes applications, information, data and infrastructures
that any IT service requires. These components leads us to
Enterprise Architecture.
Enterprise Architecture can be introduced as area which
focused on enterprise planning for IT solutions in
organizations. It has a vast use in information system
planning. Recently, some efforts of EA are focused on using
SOA in EA planning. As an example, Enterprise SOA is one
of the results of influence of SOA on EA.
This research hypothesis is to consider Service and service
architecture as integration point for convergence of SOA,
ITIL and EA. It’s because SOA is service based, ITIL
designed for management of IT services and EA tends to use
SOA for reusable architectures. Therefore, formulation of
integration point of these three areas based on service
architecture is the central point of this study.
The research objectives that are defined based on the
problem statement and research background are the
following:
1. To discover architectural requirements of IT
Service
2. To design an integrated framework to implement
IT Service Architecture based on Service Design
phase of ITIL V3
3. To extend architecture layers of EA to cover IT
service architecture
Figure 3- ITIL V3: Enterprise Architecture [3]
•
IT Infrastructure Architecture describes the structure,
functionality and geographical distribution of the
hardware, software and communication components that
underpin and support the overall architecture.
•
Environmental Architecture describes all aspects,
types and levels of environment control and their
management.
Finally OGC notifies that:
The real benefit and role of the Enterprise
Architecture comes not from the architecture itself,
but from the ability of an organization to design
and implement projects and solutions in a rapid
and consistent manner.
From above discussion, we realized that Enterprise
Architecture has been considered as a complementary
component for Service Design. In addition, ITIL suggests
extending EA layers by service layer. These new layer
should be designed to integrate EA framework to ITIL V3
framework which is our proposed framework and will be
introduced in section 5.
3. MOTIVATION
OBJECTIVES
It is important to note that main focus of this research is on
ITIL requirements for service architecture design. Therefore
firstly, I would like to analyze IT Service Architecture
requirements and based on these requirements I will compare
some closer frameworks to find or design proper target
framework.
AND
Nowadays, IT services and IT service management is an
important issue in computer science and information
systems.
520
4. METHODOLOGY
Figure 4 outlines the stages involved for successfully
completing this research. This research will be conducted in
next stages:
•
Literature review: Literature review should be done to
identify the focus area of research and determine the
scope of the research project. It will also formulate the
research questions and the hypotheses.
•
Research design: This phase will review research
methods especially in computing and information
systems and will consequently develop the research
methods and timeline for completing the research. It
will also develop the research proposal.
•
Practical study: The next step in the research is practical
study which focuses on doing survey, interviews,
observations and document review on practices of ITIL
and EA. This activity will start by survey and will be
done through some selected case studies. This will lead
researcher to primary framework of research.
•
•
5. PROPOSED
FRAMEWORK
INTEGRATED
As mentioned earlier, ITIL V3 in Service Design phase
has been suggested using Enterprise Architecture for
development of architectures needed for IT Service. This
suggestion implies that EA should involve Service
architecture layer in other EA layers. Therefore, in our
framework we should design service architecture layer to
integrate service with other layers such as application, data
and infrastructure.
In order to design required model of EA for ITIL we need
to integrate these two frameworks such that it covers
requirement of ITIL V3. Although OGC proposed a meta
model for using EA, there is not enough details and no
specific processes to do this integration in Service Design.
Therefore, we would design an integrated framework to
fulfill requirements of service architecture of ITIL. In our
framework, we should design new models, new service
architecture and new process to do this integration. Figure 5
shows general view of proposed framework by this research.
Figure 4- Research Methodology
•
cover Service Architecture layer that is designed for
ITIL/ITSM.
Propose integrated framework: In this stage, based on
artifacts of previous stage, i.e., service architecture and
candidate EA framework, design and development of
integrated framework will be lunched. In this process,
other factors and requirements will be considered.
Moreover, an automation tools for target framework
will be developed.
Evaluate the framework: In final stage, proposed
framework will be instantiated to evaluate. Evaluation
process could be done through candidate case study,
survey or interview. By completion of validation, the
conclusion will be done based on the results. Finally
researcher would write up thesis and submit it for viva.
Assess EA Framework is the final phase of literature
review which will be started by conceptualizing and
designing Service Architecture Layer and will be
followed by studying EA frameworks and comparison
of these frameworks. The purpose of this comparison is
to analyze strong compatibility of EA frameworks to
521
[1] Office of Government Commerce (OGC), ITIL Core
Books, Service Strategy, TSO, London, 2007
Figure 5 Integrated Service Architecture Framework
(ISAF)
As shown in this figure, our proposed integrated
framework includes ITIL V3, EA framework and SOA and
two new processes, namely SAM and SIM. We call this
framework as an Integrated Service Architecture Framework
(ISAF) for ITIL. As it can be seen, the most important
components of the framework includes:
•
Service Design phase in ITIL V3
•
Service Layer as a new layer for EA
•
Service Architecture Management as a new process
management of service architecture.
•
Service Integration Management as a new process
for integration of service architecture to other layers
of EA.
[2] Office of Government Commerce (OGC), ITIL Core
Books, Introduction to ITIL, TSO, London, 2007
[3] Office of Government Commerce (OGC), Service
Design, TSO, London, 2007
[4] Winter, R. and R. Fischer (2007). "Essential Layers,
Artifacts, and Dependencies of Enterprise Architecture"
Journal of Enterprise Architecture (May 2007).
[5] Susanne, L. and Z. Gregor (2006). Evaluation of current
architecture frameworks. Proceedings of the 2006 ACM
symposium on Applied computing. Dijon, France,
ACM.
[6] Christian Braun and Robert Winter , “Integration of IT
Service Management into Enterprise Architecture”,
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied
computing , Korea, 2007
6. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In this paper, firstly, we dealt on our finding on the
integration of Enterprise Architecture and ITIL. Although
few efforts have been done to do this integration, all of them
have only been discussed on ITIL V2 which its focus limited
on service delivery and service support.
By publication of ITIL V3 in 2007, OGC plans to cover
whole lifecycle of service which included five volumes as
five stages of service management: Service strategy, Service
Design, Service Transition, Service operation and Continual
Service Improvement. We found that in Service Design
volume, ITIL proposed to use Enterprise Architecture in
designing IT Service Architecture. This notification of ITIL
remains at guideline level and there is insufficient
information on how to design service architecture in practice
and in detail.
On the other hand, there exists a tendency in academic
discipline to integrate service-oriented technology and
management in order to fill the gap of technology and
management issues of IT services.
In addition, one of the benefits of this integration is to
align objectives of business with all components of
enterprise such as business processes, information systems or
applications, information and data. Moreover, IT services
and service architecture in ITIL at now needs enterprise
architecture to support it.
Based on the gap which realized we proposed an
integrated framework between ITIL V3 and EA, namely
Integrated Service Architecture Framework (ISAF) to design
service architecture for ITIL service design. This framework
is founded on ITIL V3 Service Design, EA and SOA. We
will design and develop ISAF to satisfy these objectives:
•
Design service architecture for IT Service
management.
•
Integrates service architecture layer into enterprise
architecture
•
Fulfill requirements of IT Service management in
ITIL Service Design
[7] Amborse Goikoetxea, Enterprise Architectures and
Digital Administration, World Scientific, Singapore,
2007
[8] Charles T. Betz , Architectures and Patterns for IT
Service Management, Resource Planning, and
Governance, Morgan Kaufmann , USA, 2007
7. REFERENCES
522