Infrastructure and platform management
5.3.3 Software development and management
5.4Relationships between practices and service value chain activities
6.1 Purpose
7 DIFFERENCES WITH PREVIOUS ITIL VERSIONS
7.1 Changes to the list of processes/practices
The ITIL story
ITIL has been the leading guidance for IT service management over the past three decades. Millions of practitioners worldwide have applied its guidance in their daily jobs, providing a structured approach to one of the most important support domains for modern business: the provision of information technology services for the improvement of business results.
In the modern digital business, the role of information technology (IT) has further increased and it has merged with many other domains. This emphasizes the role of IT even more. And with the acceleration of business change, IT itself needs to change even faster to support the business that it has merged with. This means that the IT service provider will have to apply Agile ways of delivering its contribution to the co-creation of value. In other words: it was time for a new edition of ITIL guidance.
In the first version of ITIL, from the end of the 1980’s up to the turn of the century, the guidance was based on a long list of best practices that were documented in dozens of small books. Although the exact number of books is under some debate, the total library counted some 50 titles. This guidance largely focused on the support of technology.
In 2000-2001 the ITIL guidance was updated and documented in a set of two core books: ITIL Service Support and ITIL Service Delivery. In the following years, additional guidance was published, but the two core books remained the authoritative references.
In 2007, the third version of ITIL was published: ITIL v3. It was built on the paradigm of a Service Lifecycle with five phases, and each phase was documented in a separate publication. These five core books were then updated in 2011 in a minor review of ITIL v3, with few differences. The ITIL v3 editions changed the focus from technology to services.
The pace of development in the IT industry in the last decade accelerated in such a way that a thoroughly redefined version of ITIL was required. It was not only technology and the role of IT in business that had made huge progress, but the practices used in the IT industry had also gone through some serious evolution, with Agile and DevOps approaches, cloud technology, and the merging of IT with many other domains being some of the most prominent features.
With the new ITIL 4, a major step has been taken to cover the latest developments. The ITIL 4 guidance supports modern ways of co-creating value in an active collaboration of stakeholders, using an Agile approach in a customer-focused setting. Its holistic approach not only underpins the management of IT services, but now also supports other domains, enabling the integration of IT with the business and with other support domains.
1 Introduction
Learning outcomes:
• Understand the purpose and components of the ITIL service value system.
Assessment criteria:
• Describe the ITIL service value system
The past decade has illustrated that delivering services has become the mainstream economic model. The merging of IT and business, and the increasing pace of development of technology, has created the need for a fully-fledged, strategic IT service management capability.
The digitization of companies and economies has made it clear that organizations must learn to deliver their IT-enabled services in a flexible way, combining Agile approaches with guarantees for predictability and stability. This places significant responsibility on the shoulders of IT service management and on its leading guidance, ITIL.
ITIL has provided leading guidance for IT service management for more than 30 years. ITIL 4 brings ITIL up-to-date by re-shaping much of the established practices in the wider context of customer experience, value streams, and digital transformation, as well as embracing new approaches such as Lean, Agile, and DevOps.
■ 1.1 THE ITIL 4 FRAMEWORK
The key components of the ITIL 4 framework are the ITIL service value system (SVS) and the four dimensions model.
1.1.1 The ITIL service value system (SVS)
The ITIL service value system (SVS) is a model demonstrating how all the components and activities of an organization work together to facilitate value creation through IT-enabled services.
These components of the SVS include:
■ the ITIL service value chain
■ the ITIL practices
■ the ITIL guiding principles
■ governance
■ continual improvement
Figure 1. The ITIL service value system (SVS)
The ITIL service value chain is a set of interconnected activities that
