I spent this weekend reading Charlie Betz's book, "Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children."
I found it to be an excellent, pragmatic book for anyone who is concerned with managing IT. There a bunch of books that define a vision of what is it to be done, but leave the pragmatics of how it is to be done.
The book is useful to anyone doing ITIL and will help you get pass some of the over ambitious claims in both ITIL books and vendor products. This book is nice in that it brings all the standards frameworks and architectures and puts a detailed data model and functional model that covers both operations and architecture.
While he does not cover service catalogs in much detail, he spends a fair amount of time defining Service Portfolio's, Service Offerings and Service Requests both from a model, definitional, and functional system point of view. The only other place I have seen that, is in our upcoming book. So it looks like we have the beginning of an agreement in how these concepts relate. Here's an excerpt from amazon.
Features
The book presents on-the-ground coverage of enabling IT governance in architectural detail, which you can use to define a strategy and start executing. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific vendor technologies. It is a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT now what? It does this through:
* A unique value chain approach to integrating the COBIT, ITIL, and CMM frameworks into a coherent, unified whole
* A field-tested, detailed conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures
* Analysis of current system types in the IT governance and enablement domains: integration opportunities, challenges, and evolutionary trends
* Patterns for integrating the process, data, and systems views to support specific problems of IT management.
* Specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise.
So if you are trying to figure out how the IT front office, the service catalog, the service portfolio, ITIL, CMDB etc actually come together, I recommend Charlie's book.
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