IT4IT Forum
IT4IT™ Forum
The IT4IT™ Forum is a forum of The Open Group (1) that is concerned with establishing an open standard for managing the business of IT. The objective is to create a reference architecture that provides prescriptive guidance to integrate the technology products and services that are used to direct the activities of an IT delivery function in an enterprise.
Background
The market for solutions to support successful delivery of IT in enterprise size organizations has traditionally been very fragmented. Software tool vendors like IBM, CA, BMC and HP have built a portfolio of solutions in a mixed model of development and acquisition. As a result, solutions have different data models that make information exchange cumbersome.
Enterprise size IT organizations have invested significantly in developing integrations between these solutions to ensure more complete and detailed insight into what is happening as the IT function emerges. Focus is shifting from individual process supporting solutions (e.g. for Portfolio Management, Incident Management, Change Management, Testing, Release Management etc.) to a more holistic approach that spans the entire IT life cycle from Strategy to Operations. This is considered necessary to maintain control over IT spend, performance and risk. Also, in order to cope with emerging disruptive innovations like Cloud computing, mobility, Big Data, the Internet of Things and alternate sourcing models (outsourcing, multi-vendor sourcing), a more robust model for managing IT is deemed necessary.
History
In August 2011 Shell Information Technology and its key technology supplier Hewlett Packard started an initiative to investigate an alternate approach to establishing a comprehensive range of IT management capabilities. After an initial assessment of relevant architecture and design collateral several other key customers of HP were invited to join this effort and named themselves the IT4IT Consortium. Next to Shell and HP Software, members of the consortium included Achmea, Munich Re, PwC, Accenture, University of South Florida, ING, AT&T and HP’s own internal IT group. As the consortium matured, the significant potential of their efforts was recognized. it was deemed appropriate to seek ways to bring the reference material that had been produced into the public domain and contact was made with several open standards bodies. Late in 2013 negotiations with the Open Group began to ensure a suitable platform would be established to govern the development of a truly open standard for managing the business of IT to the benefit of the industry as a whole. This group, which is now referred to as The Open Group IT4IT™ Forum, was formally established in July 2014 (2). The public launch of the Forum took place during the Open Group conference in London on 20 October 2014 and was accompanied by a formal press release from the Open Group (4).
Approach
After an initial assessment of reference material, roadmaps and the experiences gained from running development and implementation projects between the founding member companies, several high level use cases were developed to describe how enterprise size IT organizations work in reality. Comparisons were made between the use cases and de facto standards such as ITIL and COBIT. A parallel was found with the work of Michael Porter on Value Chains (3) and an IT specific Value Chain was designed consisting of four value streams that represent what an IT function does and which are consistent with the principles of Lean IT. These works provided the basis to identify and define functional components, data entities and integrations to create a multi-layered reference architecture. The IT4IT™ Reference Architecture is the capstone of the emerging normative standard that will support the development of software products, 'solutions' and services: more importantly, it will also support planning and implementation of those solutions and services in 'consuming' organizations.
Objectives and Purpose
To develop an open standard reference architecture for managing the business of IT that defines not just what needs to be managed in order to maintain control over cost, performance and risk of the IT services delivered, but also prescribes with a reasonable level of detail how that should be done, by specifying functional components of the overall solution set, the key data entities involved and the integration points across the total IT Value Chain or life cycle.
It is thought that having such a standard will help providers of solutions in this market to more rapidly develop a holistic set of solutions; help consuming IT organizations implement solutions faster and more quickly gain control over spend, performance and risk and help integrators better advise their customers how to extend their range of management capabilities and increase their maturity faster and at lower cost. Ultimately such a standard will promote interoperability between solutions from different vendors, thereby generating more support for sourcing from multiple vendors and increase the range of sourcing options for consumers of IT management solutions.
Founding members of the IT4IT™ Consortium
Karel van Zeeland - Shell Information Technology
Georg Bock - HP Software
Lars Rossen - HP Software
Richard Aarnink - Achmea
Sue Desiderio - PwC
Philippe Geneste - Accenture
Charles Betz - AT&T
Andy Hopkins - ING
Chris Davis - USF
Ulrich Wanka - Munich Re
Brian Hodgdon - HP IT
References
- 1. The Open Group: http://www.opengroup.org/
- 2. The Open Group IT4IT Forum: https://collaboration.opengroup.org/forums/it4it/
- 3. Value Chain model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_chain
- 4. The Open Group press release: http://opengroup.org/news/press/the-open-group-IT4IT-forum-launched-in-london