Evolving standards for IT service management

In this paper we describe standards and widely adopted best practices that facilitate the deployment of information technology service management (ITSM). We cover the Information Technology Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) framework of best practices for delivering information technology (IT) services. As part of ITIL we discuss the central role played by the configuration management database (CMDB). Then we describe the CMDB federation specification, an emerging standard for federating data repositories in support of a CMDB. We discuss two standards for representing management data and constraints on those data: the Service Modeling Language (SML) and the Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD). Finally, we describe how related but incompatible Web services standards are being unified into a consistent set of standards.