ITIL4 - MOTIVATION, BACKGROUND AND CONTENT
Motivation for a new ITIL version
The corporate world has been undergoing major change for some time now. Industrialization and digitization are not just media buzzwords in all industries and corporate sectors, but lived reality. Not only digital unicorns like Google, Apple and Spotify are affected by this. Even traditional industries such as automotive suppliers, financial service providers, insurance companies and the entire public sector are experiencing a surge in digitized processes. Spare parts and maintenance services are offered and sold via portals, ID cards and even bulky waste are ordered electronically. Customer demands on IT services are becoming increasingly agile as a result, and the customer has a say in implementation as well as operation...constantly. At the same time, the technologies offered change so quickly that there is hardly any time to establish them sustainably, and the whole thing takes place in highly volatile market and business environments. These general conditions have led to a brutal increase in the project load in IT organizations due to the demand for agility, while at the same time the day-to-day operational business can hardly be managed.
The good thing about this development is that IT is more important for business success than ever before. IT is business! The other side of the coin is that the pressure on IT is growing. Now the customer demand has to be met "GOOD" and "FAST" at the same time.
IT is business...but IT must become better, faster and smarter to do justice to this. Replacing outdated ways of working with intelligent, agile and lean processes is an important building block for this. IT is becoming increasingly embedded in all other parts of the company, software development and IT operations are moving closer together (DevOps), traditional functional silos are being broken down and cross-functional teams are being deployed.
In order to do justice to all this in service management as well, it became necessary for ITIL to take the next evolutionary step with version 4. Towards value creation with the help of agile, lean and reliable services.
ITIL 4 - What's in it
Driven by the framework conditions described above, ITIL 4 is a consistent further development of ITIL v3 Edition 2011. ITIL remains ITIL in the new version. Because even in the digitalized world, IT services must be disrupted, problems must be solved, and changes must be implemented. Only more agile, more effective, leaner and more intelligent than before. The essential principles and concepts in ITIL remain valid in the new version. But strong and clear references are made to modern methods such as Agile, DevOps and Lean and how these are linked to the best practices in ITIL. This agile and intelligent application of the proven and still necessary ITIL best practices will enable IT to radically increase the deployment frequency of new or changed services, brutally shorten implementation times for changes, significantly reduce recovery times for disrupted services and significantly reduce the rate of failed changes. ITIL thus supports companies on their path to digital transformation.
ITIL 4 - What's new?
ITIL 4 is a consistent update of the previously valid ITIL v3 Edition 2011. We find changes and extensions to the service taxonomy and various fundamental models such as the Guiding Principles and the CSI Approach. Furthermore, clear references and integrations with modern terms, methods and technologies such as DevOps, Agile, Lean and Cloud have been implemented, making the established and also a few new practices and processes much more flexible and agile to apply. The Service Lifecycle is replaced by the Service Value Chain as an organizing framework, which helps the complete framework out of its often misinterpreted rigidity. The value chain and the 34 practices described represent the necessary capabilities and agile application in value chains for the co-creation of value in the form of products and services. ITIL 4 therefore no longer talks about processes. It is about practices, in which the capabilities of an organization are manifested that it needs to generate value creation as an outcome together with its customers. These practices are sorted into three areas. The first group is the general practices such as Continuous Improvement, Strategy or Supplier Management. The Service Management Practices contain the modernized processes that were mainly found in Service Design, Service Transition and Service Operation in the old ITIL version. The Technical Practices include topics such as Software Development & Management, Deployment Management and Infrastructure & Platform Management. The entire value chain is controlled and monitored by Governance.
The Service Value System (the new regulatory framework) describes how all components and activities in the organization work together to enable value creation together with the customer.
Conclusion
ITIL remains ITIL in the new version. ITIL 4 is the sum of its predecessors...and more. The core themes of Service Management are still there and more important than ever. Themes such as Agile, DevOps and Lean are now embedded in such a way that ITIL can be used in a significantly leaner, more agile and smarter way in the future. You could say that ITIL 4 is fully "backward compatible" because it picks up service organizations exactly where they are today. This is perhaps its greatest strength. ITIL 4 thus helps IT organizations to find and follow their path to digitization. Therefore, this evolutionary step of ITIL comes exactly at the right time, is absolutely necessary and makes sense.
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