But service-oriented architecture makes that approach to IT management obsolete, says Mary Johnston Turner, vice president of the Ovum Corp.'s Summit analyst firm.
One approach to coping with all the nitty-gritty IT management issues involved in maintaining an SOA application is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, she said. In contrast to SOA, there is nothing new about ITIL. It was originally developed by the UK Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s in an early attempt to align IT with business goals.
"It's non-proprietary," says Ken Hamilton, director of IT service management education at Hewlett-Packard Corp., where he advocates the use of ITIL with SOA. "There's a publicly available set of books describing it."
