The IT4IT™ Reference Architecture, Version 2.1

The Open Group IT4IT™ Reference Architecture, Version 2.1, 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 uses a value chain approach to create a model of the functions that IT performs to help organizations identify the activities that contribute to business competitiveness.
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 the TOGAF® standard) 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