The open group series - The IT4IT™ reference architecture

The Open Group IT4IT™ Reference Architecture, Version 2.0, an Open Group Standard, provides a vendor-neutral, technology-agnostic, and industry-agnostic reference architecture for managing the business of IT.

The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture standard comprises a reference architecture and a value chain-based operating model.

The IT Value Chain has four value streams supported by a reference architecture to drive efficiency and agility. The four value streams are:

• Strategy to Portfolio

• Request to Fulfill

• Requirement to Deploy

• Detect to Correct

Each IT Value Stream is centered on a key aspect of the service model, the essential data objects (information model), and functional components (functional model) that support it. Together, the four value streams play a vital role in helping IT control the service model as it advances through its lifecycle.

The IT4IT Reference Architecture:

• Provides prescriptive guidance on the specification of and interaction with a consistent service model backbone (common data model/context)

• Supports real-world use-cases driven by the Digital Economy (e.g., Cloud-sourcing, Agile, DevOps, and service brokering)

• Embraces and complements existing process frameworks and methodologies (e.g., ITIL®, CoBIT®, SAFe, and TOGAF®) by taking a data-focused implementation model perspective, essentially specifying an information model across the entire value chain

The audience for this standard is:

• IT Professionals who are responsible for delivering services in a way that is

flexible, traceable, and cost-effective

• IT Professionals / Practitioners who are focused on instrumenting the IT

management landscape

• IT Leaders who are concerned about their operating model

• Enterprise Architects who are responsible for IT business transformation

Topics covered include:

• An introduction to the standard and the purpose of the IT4IT work

• Key terminology of the standard

• An introduction for executives and others introducing the IT Value Chain and IT4IT Reference Architecture concepts

• IT4IT Core, which defines the structure of the IT4IT standard as well as the process and document structure used by the IT4IT standard

• The Strategy to Portfolio (S2P) Value Stream

• The Requirement to Deploy (R2D) Value Stream

• The Request to Fulfill (R2F) Value Stream

• The Detect to Correct (D2C) Value Stream

• Background information on the standard.