Two of today's most popular acronyms in the alphabet soup of the IT industry are ITIL and SOA. The IT Infrastructure Library has gained attention as a governance framework aimed at helping IT operations people become more productive and effective, while service-oriented architecture has become the guidepost for software developers seeking to make their applications more user-friendly and flexible. Although these two concepts complement each another, many organisations have failed to align their ITIL and SOA initiatives properly.
ITIL and SOA are not new, but they are gaining greater attention as impatience with IT inefficiencies and application inflexibility reaches an all-time high. ITIL provides a time-tested set of straightforward principles for organising an effective IT operations group.