ITIL4 - MOTIVATION, BACKGROUND, AND CONTENT
Reasons for a New ITIL Version
The business world has been undergoing significant change for quite some time. Industrialization and digitalization are not just buzzwords in the media but a lived reality across all industries and business sectors. It’s not just digital unicorns like Google, Apple, and Spotify that are affected. Even traditional industries such as automotive suppliers, financial services, insurance, and the entire public sector are experiencing a surge in digitized processes. Replacement parts and maintenance services are offered and sold through online portals, and ID cards—and even bulky waste—are ordered electronically. As a result, customer expectations for IT services are becoming increasingly agile, and customers are constantly involved in both implementation and operations. At the same time, the technologies on offer are changing so rapidly that there is barely any time to establish them sustainably, and all of this is taking place in highly volatile market and corporate environments. These conditions mean that the project workload within IT organizations has increased dramatically due to the required agility, while at the same time, day-to-day operations are barely manageable.
The good thing about this trend is that IT is more important to a company’s success than ever before. IT is business! The flip side is that the pressure on IT is growing. Now, the challenge is to meet customer demands for both “GOOD” and “FAST” service at the same time.
IT is business…but IT must become better, faster, and smarter to live up to that expectation. A key component of this is replacing outdated work methods with intelligent, agile, and lean processes. IT is becoming increasingly embedded in all other parts of the company; software development and IT operations are converging (DevOps), traditional functional silos are being broken down, and cross-functional teams are being deployed.
To address all of these challenges in service management, it became necessary for ITIL to take the next evolutionary step with Version 4—toward creating value through agile, lean, and reliable services.
ITIL 4 – What's Included
Driven by the framework conditions described above, ITIL 4 is a logical evolution of ITIL v3 Edition 2011. ITIL remains ITIL even in this new version. After all, even in a digital world, IT services must be stabilized, problems resolved, and changes implemented—only in a more agile, effective, streamlined, and intelligent way than before. The core principles and concepts in ITIL remain valid in the new version. However, strong and clear connections are established to modern methodologies such as Agile, DevOps, and Lean, and how these are linked to ITIL best practices. This agile and intelligent application of proven and still-essential ITIL best practices will enable IT to radically increase the deployment frequency of new or modified services, drastically shorten change implementation times, significantly reduce recovery times for disrupted services, and substantially lower the rate of failed changes. In this way, ITIL supports companies on their path to digital transformation.
ITIL 4 – What's New?
ITIL 4 is a comprehensive update to the previously valid ITIL v3 Edition 2011. It includes changes and enhancements to the service taxonomy and various fundamental models, such as the Guiding Principles and the CSI Approach. Furthermore, clear connections and integrations with modern concepts, methods, and technologies—such as DevOps, Agile, Lean, and Cloud—have been implemented, making established practices and processes—as well as a few new ones—significantly more flexible and agile to apply. The Service Lifecycle is replaced by the Service Value Chain as the organizing framework, which helps free the entire framework from its often-misinterpreted rigidity. The Value Chain and the 34 described practices represent the necessary capabilities and agile application within value chains for the co-creation of value in the form of products and services. Thus, ITIL 4 no longer refers to “processes.” It focuses on practices through which an organization’s capabilities—those needed to generate value as an outcome in collaboration with its customers—are manifested. These practices are organized into three categories. The first group consists of general practices such as Continual Improvement, Strategy, and Supplier Management. The Service Management Practices encompass the modernized processes that, in the previous version of ITIL, were primarily found in Service Design, Service Transition, and Service Operation. The Technical Practices cover topics such as Software Development & Management, Deployment Management, and Infrastructure & Platform Management. The entire value chain is governed and monitored.
The Service Value System (the new framework) describes how all components and activities within the organization work together to create value in collaboration with the customer.
Conclusion
ITIL remains ITIL even in its new version. ITIL 4 is the sum of its predecessors…and more. The core topics of service management are still there and more important than ever. Topics such as agility, DevOps, and Lean are now so seamlessly integrated that ITIL can be implemented in a significantly leaner, more agile, and smarter way in the future. It can be said that ITIL 4 is fully “backward-compatible,” as it meets service organizations exactly where they stand today. This is perhaps its greatest strength. In this way, ITIL 4 helps IT organizations find and pursue their path to digital transformation. That is why this evolutionary step for ITIL comes at exactly the right time—it is absolutely necessary and sensible.
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