The future is built on ITIL

ITIL is the most widely adopted guidance for IT service management for 30 years. And now, ITIL4 has been launched, with support for digital services and high performance organizations.

After a century of steam, electricity and computers, we have invisibly launched the 4th industrial revolution, in which the barriers between people and technology will gradually disappear. Cloud computing, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the Internet of Things, machine learning, blockchain and many other digital ideas turn the order of things we know upside down. Digital disruption changes proven business models and ways of delivering value, overthrows some companies to create new leaders instead.

The new ITIL4 adapts IT service management best practices to an increasingly complex, changing, ambiguous and uncertain world (VUCA world) and presents them in a broader context of customer experiences, value streams and digital transformation, and increasingly popular approaches, such as Lean, Agile, DevOps.

In a nutshell, Lean methods provide perspectives on customer value and the elimination of waste; Agile methods focus on making improvements incrementally at a cadence, DevOps methods work holistically and ensure that improvements are not only designed well, but applied effectively. ITIL4 takes now all these methods under its umbrella.

SERVICE AND CO-CREATION OF VALUE

Let's talk about value. It is nothing more than the perception of benefit, utility and meaning of something, for example service. The value may be subjective as it depends on the perception of the service those interested. Some customers may purchase and leave positive feedback, the other might decline and check out the competition. The services may be identical, but customers with different requirements, have the right to see them in completely different ways.

ITIL4 brings a refreshed definition of a service:

A means of enabling value co-creation, by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.

There was a time when organizations self-identifying as ‘service providers’ saw their role as delivering value to their customers in much the way that a package is delivered to a building by a delivery company. This view treated the relationship between the service provider and the service consumer as mono-directional and distant. The provider delivers the service and the consumer receives value; the consumer plays no role in the creation of value for themselves. This fails to take into consideration the highly complex and interdependent service relationships that exist in reality.

More and more, organizations recognize that value is co-created through an active collaboration between providers and consumers, as well as other organizations that are part of the relevant service relationships. Providers should no longer attempt to work in a vacuum to define what will be of value to their customers and users, but actively seek to establish mutually beneficial, interactive relationships with their consumers, empowering them to be creative collaborators in the service value chain.

SERVICE VALUE SYSTEM

In order for service management to work properly, it must function as one compact system. The ITIL service value system shows how various components of an organization and all activities undertaken by it work together to facilitate creation of value through services.

There are 5 main components of the service values system: ITIL guiding principles, Governance, ITIL service value chain, ITIL practices and Continual improvement.

Fig. ITIL service value system

These components can be combined in a flexible way, but this requires good integration and coordination to maintain the coherence of the whole organization. The service value system defined in the ITIL model facilitates this integration and coordination. It provides a strong, unified, value-oriented direction of the organization's development.

SERVICE VALUE CHAIN

At the very center of the service value system is the ITIL service value chain, which replaces the well-known service lifecycle. Service value chain provides an operational model for creation, delivery and continuous improvement of services. It is a flexible model that defines 6 key activities that can be combined in different ways to create multiple value streams. These actions are: Plan, Improve, Engage, Design and transition, Obtain/ build, Deliver and support.

Fig. Service value chain

The service value chain is flexible enough to adapt to different approaches, both to a centralized IT department and to cross-functional teams from the DevOps model. As a reminder, the previous versions of the ITIL library were focused mainly on the model of centralized IT - IT department, shared services center or commercial company providing IT services on the market. And there is nothing wrong with the centralized model, except that it is not the only IT service management model present on the market and will not be optimal in all conditions.

The real challenge, however, is the coexistence of different models in one organization. Gartner called it a bi-modal approach (mode 1 with focus on reliability and mode 2 with focus on agility). ITIL4 speaks about multi-modality, because in practice there can be more than those two service management models. The ability to adapt the value chain to specific needs makes it easier for organizations to respond to changing requirements of stakeholder in the most effective and efficient way.

ITIL PRACTICES

The flexibility of the service value chain is further enhanced by ITIL practices. Each ITIL practice supports many activities in the service value chain, providing a full set of universal tools for IT service management practitioners. ITIL4 defines 34 practices, some are already well known from ITIL3, some are completely new, others have changed significantly:

• General management practices: Architecture management, Continual improvement, Information security management, Knowledge management, Measurement and reporting, Organizational change management, Portfolio management, Project management, Relationship management, Risk management, Service financial management, Strategy management, Supplier management, Workforce and talent management
• Service management practices: Availability management, Business analysis, Capacity and performance management, Change control, Incident management, IT asset management, Monitoring and event management, Problem management, Release management, Service catalogue management, Service configuration management, Service continuity management, Service design, Service desk, Service level management, Service request management, Service validation and testing
• Technical management practices: Deployment management, Infrastructure and platform management, Software development and management

FOUR DIMENSIONS MODEL

To provide a comprehensive approach to service management, ITIL4 defines four dimensions of service management. Each component of the service value system should be analyzed from the perspective of: Organizations and people, Information and technology, Partners and suppliers, Value streams and processes.

Fig. Four dimensions of service management

The previous versions of the ITIL library focused exclusively on processes, missing other dimensions of service management. By focusing sufficiently on each of the four dimensions, an organization ensures that its service value system is sustainable and effective.

Moreover, service providers do not operate in isolation. They are affected by many external factors and work in dynamic and complex environment that can exhibit high degrees of volatility and uncertainty and impose constraints on how the service provider can work. To analyse these external factors, you may use the PESTLE model (it is an acronym for the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors.

START YOUR JOURNEY WITH ITIL4

The 4th industrial revolution, new destructive technologies and business models are forcing digital transformations on organization. However, its concerns are greater than just the technology. It changes the functioning of the entire organization and the general way of thinking. The aim is to enable organizations to compete effectively in a world where change is not a problem, but a permanent element of the environment. Each organization must balance the need for stability and predictability with the growing need for agility and speed at operational level.

Service management undergoes continuous changes in order to support organizational transformation and to ensure that the opportunities offered by new technologies and new ways of operation are utilized to its full potential. ITIL4 serves as an excellent digital world guide for individuals and organizations alike.

Together with ITIL4, Axelos - the owner of the ITIL model - is introducing a new certification scheme with two paths: 

• ITIL Managing Professional - to get this designation you need to complete 5 modules: ITIL Foundation + 3 ITIL Specialist modules + ITIL Strategist,
• ITIL Strategic Leader - to get this designation you need to complete 3 modules: ITIL Foundation + ITIL Strategist + ITIL Leader.

The ITIL certification scheme provides a modular approach to the ITIL framework, and is comprised of a series of qualifications focused on different aspects of ITIL best practice to various degrees of depth and detail. The tiered structure of the qualification offers candidates flexibility relating to the different disciplines and areas of ITIL and the ability to focus their studies on key areas of interest.

There is also the ITIL Managing Professional Transition module (some prefer to use the name Bridge). It is designed for candidates who are ITIL v3 Experts or who have achieved 17 credits from the ITIL v3 scheme.

All ITIL4 trainings are available in-house or in a classroom at Asseco Academy. Are you already on the way to ITIL4?

Fig. ITIL 4 certification scheme