One Year ITIL 4

Introduction

In February ITIL 4 will be one year old - time to draw a first conclusion. My initial finding in my blog on the release last February was that ITIL 4 is a successful new version that is up to date. I still stand by that; today, thanks to the additional publications that have appeared in the meantime and a lot of experience from courses and discussions with customers, we can take a more differentiated look at it.

Popularity

- Even with Version 4, ITIL continues to remain popular. This is proven by high volumes of courses at Digicomp and constant demand for briefings from companies and organisations from all industries. Also my contributions to the topic on LinkedIn reach unimagined heights of more than 2000 views 😊!

- So the interest is very high, but I still have hardly any organisations that use ITIL 4. It's probably too early for that - ITIL 3 also needed a few years to find broad application. Of course, the rule still applies that ITIL cannot be 'implemented', but can be applied to challenges and improvement opportunities according to the situation. The manifold application potentials for ITIL 4 will continue to develop as soon as the contents of the advanced modules become known to a wider audience. More about this towards the end of this article.

Challenges

While at the launch of ITIL 3 in 2007, all contents were published in five books at one go, the publication of the more advanced books for ITIL 4 is dragging on and is still not complete even one year later. Meanwhile the books on 'Create, Deliver and Support', 'Drive Stakeholder Value', High-Velocity IT', 'Direct, Plan and Improve' are available in draft versions, but we still know almost nothing about the last book 'Digital and IT Strategy'...

Figure 1: Overview of the ITIL 4 modules

Thus the potential of ITIL 4 cannot yet be conclusively assessed - this will probably be the topic of next year's '2 years of ITIL 4' blog post 😊.

But what is already clear today: ITIL 4 is faster and leaner than ITIL 3. The core architecture is no longer the Service Lifecycle but the Service Value System, which attempts to identify value from each activity on a tactical and operational level rather than providing comprehensive Service Lifecycle Management structures. The practices are also described in less detail than the ITIL V3 processes they are intended to replace.

For all ITIL 3 users this means that ITIL 4 is not a complete replacement but rather an additional layer that allows Service Management to be integrated into the brave new world of Agile, DevOps and Lean.

Ultimately, this is also good news for all of us who have made substantial investments in ITIL 3: These can easily be reused, but new, agile and lean options are now available for continuous development.

Potentials

Based on the content known to date, I am convinced that ITIL can provide a framework for integrating service management into the requirements of an IT organization for the digital age. With its focus on Service Production (Create, Deliver and Support), Value (Drive Stakeholder Value), Speed (High-Velocity IT), Continual Improvement and Governance (Direct, Plan, Improve) and Strategy (Digital & IT Strategy), ITIL 4 links the most important developments in IT of the last 10 years: Agile, Lean, Cloud, DevOps and Digitalization. Issues such as governance, which had previously been neglected, have been strengthened. It has also been correctly recognized that the most important factor in digitization is people. This fact is taken into account very strongly in all of them.

Conclusion

I think we all need some time to understand and digest all the new features in ITIL 4 - but I am sure that ITIL 4 will soon reach the same status as its predecessors.