ITIL Version 3 - What The Changes Could Mean To You

Author: Hank Marquis

Abstract

The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) v3, released in 2007, is an exciting major overhaul of the previous version. Its focus on managing IT along business lines and a movement away from strict process control is having a dramatic impact on the entire IT industry.

An enhanced and clarified descriptive core, more prescriptive additions, better guidance on business alignment, and recent international standards approvals move ITIL from a "nice to have" to a "must have" for any IT professional or organization. If you have been putting off ITIL, now is the time to begin. If you are already implementing ITIL, you must consider these new capabilities. In either case, you need to understand the impact that ITIL v3 is having on the IT industry.

ITIL Version 3

The goal of the new ITIL is to provide a business-aligned implementation that you can customize to your specific situation. New topics include: understanding business catalysts and how they produce IT strategies; how you should respond to specific business drivers like compliance, regulation, demand management; and how to interoperate with other standards and best practices.

ITIL v3 uses an IT services lifecycle model in a hub-and-spoke design with fundamental core concepts as the hub and specific market and industry guidance as the spokes. Because ITIL involves best practices, it can never be fully prescriptive and must always remain descriptive. However, the changes to ITIL v3 are more detailed and industry-directed and, thus, more prescriptive than the previous ITIL.

ITIL v3 also provides significant new resources to help align with business, communicate with customers, manage suppliers, and manage services.

Reasons for ITIL v3

The UK's Office of Government Commerce (OGC) owns the core guidance and the ITIL brand, but they passed responsibility for stewardship to itSMF International (international ITIL user group). They also engaged the APM Group Limited (APMG) to manage the ITIL v3 certification process and program, which is dramatically changed from ITIL v2.

According to a letter written from the OGC to the itSMF discussing collaboration on ITIL v3 development:

"Ownership in this context means OGC is the ultimate authority on the content of core guidance in ITIL and provides visible endorsement through use of OGC-owned brands and trademarks."

"Stewardship means the assurance that the guidance is truly best practice through the engagement of experts in development and promulgation."

ItSMF stewardship is important and makes ITIL v3 truly representative of the industry and driven by input from the worldwide ITIL community. The ITIL v3 refresh committee solicited and reviewed 530 written responses and over 6,000 comments-representing 80% of the countries with an itSMF chapter.

As taken from the ITIL refresh publication, the top changes requested were:
Provide consistent structure and navigation throughout the entire library. ITIL v3 is much more consistent in its use of terms and its structure than previous versions.

Preserve the fundamental core concepts of the existing Service Support and Service Delivery books while expanding and improving upon these fundamental concepts. ITIL v3 has five primary books that incorporate all of the ITIL v2 processes. Further, ITIL v3 has clarified discrepancies many practitioners found in ITIL v2. For example, ITIL v3 has a new Request Fulfillment process; whereas ITIL v2 promoted a service request as a form of Incident.

Include best practices that extend deeper into service management concepts and reflect ITIL's relevance to business in a more tangible way, and show how ITIL can be built into business processes and cycles. ITIL v3 has more content practitioners can use in the form of tools, worksheets and models than ITIL v2. Additionally, ITIL v3 expands to include not only processes, but also functions. Whereas ITIL v2 has one function (the Service Desk), ITIL v3 offers many functional descriptions of common activities, how to organize, roles, technology considerations, and how to implement.

Provide guidance on the softer issues of organizational structures, cultural issues, and an understanding of the interfaces to other best practices that help support effective ITIL practices in the workplace. Primary improvements here include business alignment techniques, and aligning with popular complimentary guidance outside of the traditional IT mix. For example, a focus on knowledge management, and referencing popular non-IT books around financial and change management.

Provide a knowledge management strategy to support the service management needs of business and IT environments today and tomorrow. Within the ITIL the new Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) guidance helps practitioners manage and grow knowledge - the cornerstone of productivity and efficiency.

Demonstrate and articulate value, benefits, and Return on Investment (ROI) to establish the value proposition for ITIL. ITIL v3 says not to start your ITIL journey with process, but rather business strategy and service value. This fundamental shift is extremely valuable to IT managers and practitioners since one of the top issues IT faces is communicating with business executives in business terms.

Reflect the reality of today's business, operational, procurement, and technical environments including the use of ITIL in multi-sourced IT environments. ITIL v3 excels in this regard with the introduction of service provider categories that include commercial IT service providers and guidance for supplier management.

The purpose of ITIL v3 as defined by the OGC is, "to ensure, on behalf of all interested parties, that ITIL provides a single, coherent description of IT service management core activities and products, based on best practice, supported by high-quality qualifications and services that are consistent with the core principles of ITIL." The new version delivers on all counts.