One of the biggest challenges every business faces is how to start merging greater control through information-technology service management, or ITSM, as well as greater change and evolvability of systems through developer operations, according to Wikibon Inc. researcher Peter Burris (Wikibon is the sister company to SiliconANGLE Media).

And whether you’re using an IT infrastructure library framework, or ITIL, or working from the perspective of DevOps, enterprises are constantly looking for the most efficient ways to manage their systems and create solutions that fall within the intersection of the two.

“I was surprised how easy it is to get sucked in if you’re in a big enterprise, you’re siloed, you have a specific role that you have to do, and you have instructions how you’re supposed to do that, and you want to stick to it,” shared Dick Stark (pictured), president of RightStar Inc., regarding the need for silo-busters. “Whatever your assignment is, you have to do that, but that’s not the right thing to do. Remember, it’s about collaboration, it’s about transparency, it’s about posting your goals, posting the results, and moving forward from there.” 

Stark spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the BMC Helix Immersion Days event in Santa Clara, California. They discussed how trouble spots in DevOps and ITSM can be addressed, the relationship between DevOps and ITSM, and the human side of these evolving processes. (*Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Burris: Tell us a little bit about RightStar.

Stark: RightStar is an ITSM consultancy, and we happen to be a DevOps consultancy at the same time. We’re also a BMC solution provider and an Atlassian solution provider. We’ve been a BMC solution provider for 16 years, so we’ve been in this space a long time, and we’ve earned several accolades along the way. 

We made it into the Forrester ITSM service provider, it’s not called a Magic Quadrant, because that’s what Gartner uses, but instead it’s a Wave report. And so we’ve made it into the far right-hand quadrant there. If you added up all the points, we ended up in North America being rated number five out of all the different ITSM consultancies, so we’re very proud about that. And then last year with BMC we were the North American solution provider of the year in the DSM space.

Burris: What does ITSM, from a technology and people and process standpoint, have to do to accommodate some of the changes that are being founded and diffusing out of the whole DevOps world, which is just having an enormous impact on how IT thinks and does?

Stark: It really has, and we’ve been in this space a long time. ITSM, sometimes ITIL, the words are interchangeable. There are about 3 million people that ended up getting an ITIL certification of some sort. Over time, that’s been a really big deal. However, ITIL now has lost its luster just a little bit, and it’s allowed DevOps to sort of sneak in. ITIL isn’t standing still, though; they’ve bounced back and bounced back in a hard way. They’ve come up with what’s now called ITIL 4, and ITIL 4 was just released this year, and it takes some of those DevOps principles, and it has its own value stream as well, and as a result, ITIL 4 is taking a little bit stronger position. And when I say DevOps principles, it’s things like collaborate, like promote, like operate and automate; it’s all about collaboration and some of these other values that you’ll see in DevOps. 

I guess what happened is, we spent a lot of time in the ITIL side of things, and we did things for a process sake. And a good example would be change management. We spent a lot of time putting together change management processes per this ITIL framework. What happened is that a lot of the users then rebelled a little bit because it might take longer to go through and fill out all the paperwork to do a change than to actually perform the change itself. So ITIL got a little bit of a bad rap, and so that’s where this whole DevOps thing has come in. The whole idea right now is to get dev and ops under the same umbrella, because that’s not typically very easy to do. But it’s certainly happening.

Burris: How do you see the relationships between DevOps and ITSM and the business starting to evolve so that you can have a more coherent, comprehensive view of how you make system change?

Stark: Well I think in that particular case, it’s going to take some time. It’s not going to happen overnight. That’s why you have Agile coaches, or that’s why you have the scaled Agile, or the SAFe framework is because people don’t get it, and they need to understand how to work together better with others. And so it’s not going to happen by just implementing a new tool set, turning the key and then saying, “OK, everything’s going to be fine.” 

It’s good to get the integration between all the different tool sets, and the technology is certainly there to do that, but without having some instruction to begin with and having the darn usage cooperate, you’re not going to see that kind of performance improvement or cost savings, or whatever it is that you’re looking for.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BMC Helix Immersion Days event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the BMC Helix Immersion Days event. Neither BMC Helix, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE