The crux of ITIL is the concept that IT delivers services to the business. So how do you develop a basic vocabulary of services so, as in software development, we won't have to reinvent the wheel each time that IT lays out service contracts?

A couple pieces are starting to fall into place to help IT speak with a tongue that is more coherent than the geek speak that typically passes for describing what the data center delivers. A working group of 11 vendors comprising a who’s who of computing – BEA, BMC, CA, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun – is formulating a proposed spec for a library common service models, called Common Modeling Library (CML).

It leverages a W3C effort to standardize a language for modeling IT services, called appropriately enough, Service Modeling Language (SML). Think of it as the IT services equivalent of what software architects do in UML, or business process architects do in BPMN, or richer proprietary modeling languages from BPM vendors like Pegasystems or IDS Scheer. A major differentiator is that SML is written in XML.

As described in this white paper, the idea is to have a core library of modeling elements or building blocks relating to the services that IT delivers. They could include artifacts like impact analysis of disruption to an IT service, what-if analysis of a proposed change in IT service, and a model for deploying a service. As proposed, CML would also include rules and guidelines for extending or recombining these templates or vanilla models.

At this point, CML is just a proposal, and as yet, the working group has not come to terms with a body where it would be formally standardized, although candidates could include the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force), caretaker of the decade-old CIM and current steward of the CMDBf (CMDB Federation) and WS-Management specification; or Oasis, where you have specs like WSDM that propose using web services for communicating IT infrastructure monitoring data.

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