How to Incorporate IT4IT Into Your ITIL 4 Environment

ITIL has long been the backbone of IT Service Management (ITSM), offering flexible, platform-agnostic guidance to organizations worldwide. However, this flexibility can also lead to challenges, as ITIL often stops short of prescribing how to implement its principles in specific contexts. This is where IT4IT complements ITIL by providing detailed, actionable steps for managing digital products and services across their lifecycle. Together, ITIL and IT4IT create a comprehensive framework that bridges strategic guidance and operational execution.

The Origins of IT4IT

IT4IT emerged from efforts to address gaps in existing IT frameworks. While ITIL provided broad guidance, the lack of detailed, prescriptive instructions left many organizations searching for more specific solutions. Attempts to fill this gap included Microsoft’s Operations Framework (MOF) and HP’s internal tools for integrating IT operations.

• Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF): Designed in 2008 to align ITIL principles with Microsoft’s ecosystem, MOF offered practical guidance but was limited to Microsoft tools and eventually discontinued.
• HP’s Contribution: HP faced integration challenges with its growing portfolio of IT tools. To address these, it developed internal guidance for rationalizing tools and automating workflows, which later formed the foundation of IT4IT. HP donated this framework to the Open Group, a consortium of technology standards organizations.
• The Open Group: Building on HP’s framework, the Open Group refined and expanded it into IT4IT, releasing its first version in 2015 and the most recent version (v3.0) in 2022.

Today, IT4IT is recognized as a gold standard for prescriptive IT service management, enabling organizations to align tools, processes, and outcomes.

Understanding IT4IT: Core Concepts

IT4IT revolves around managing digital products throughout their lifecycle using the Digital Value Network (DVN). This framework maps the journey of a product from ideation to delivery and operation. The DVN consists of four high-level functional groups and seven value streams, which provide detailed workflows for every stage of the lifecycle.

Figure 1: Digital Value Network

What is a Digital Product? 

In the IT4IT framework, the Digital Product is the core entity that unifies IT management across its full lifecycle. It serves as the focal point for IT investment and accountability, ensuring alignment across strategy, development, operations, and consumer interactions.

By managing the Digital Product Portfolio, organizations can drive efficiency and agility, integrating Lean, Agile, and DevOps principles. This approach brings together applications, services, and products under a single concept, enhancing cross-functional collaboration and automation.

At its essence, a Digital Product represents more than just software—it encompasses product variations, consumer needs, financial models, dependencies, supplier relationships, service levels, and distribution strategies. This perspective empowers Product Managers to oversee a product’s lifecycle holistically, optimizing value creation from funding through ongoing support.

By adopting a Digital Product mindset, IT organizations can enhance visibility, streamline management, and accelerate digital transformation.

Four High-Level Functional Groups

In IT4IT, the four high-level functional groups represent the major phases of managing digital products and services. Each group plays a crucial role in ensuring that IT

Figure 2: IT4IT High-Level Functional Groups

operations are structured, efficient, and aligned with business goals. These functional groups provide a clear framework for organizing IT activities, from initial planning to ongoing operations.

1. Plan focuses on defining strategy, managing portfolios, and shaping enterprise architecture to align IT efforts with business objectives.
2. Build involves designing, developing, and testing digital products, ensuring they meet quality and functionality requirements.
3. Deliver oversees the deployment and management of service offerings, making products available to users in a controlled and efficient manner.
4. Run is responsible for maintaining and monitoring digital products, resolving issues, and ensuring continuous service reliability.

Together, these functional groups structure the IT lifecycle, with each stage connected by seven value streams that define the workflows needed to create and sustain value.

Seven Value Streams

In IT4IT, the seven value streams define the essential workflows that guide a digital product through its lifecycle, from conception to continuous improvement. Each value stream represents a sequence of activities that generate value for stakeholders, ensuring that IT operations are efficient, automated, and aligned with business needs.

1. Explore helps organizations investigate new ideas and prioritize opportunities for innovation.
2. Integrate ensures that digital products are properly developed, tested, and prepared for deployment.
3. Release streamlines the packaging and delivery of new features and updates, incorporating automation and CI/CD principles.
4. Deploy focuses on efficiently rolling out digital products into production while minimizing risks.
5. Consume/Fulfill defines how users access and subscribe to digital products through service catalogs or self-service portals.
6. Operate manages ongoing service performance, monitoring, and incident resolution to ensure reliability.
7. Evaluate continuously assesses digital products, gathering feedback for ongoing improvements and strategic alignment.

These value streams are the foundation of IT4IT’s prescriptive approach, ensuring that every phase of the IT lifecycle is structured and optimized for delivering maximum value.

Figure 3: The IT4IT Value Streams

Implementing IT4IT in Your ITIL 4 Environment

To effectively incorporate IT4IT into your ITIL 4 practices, it is essential to align its prescriptive guidance with ITIL’s broader principles. Here’s how to do it step by step:

1. Leverage ITIL 4’s Guiding Principles
   ITIL 4’s principles, such as “Progress Iteratively with Feedback” and “Focus on Value,” align closely with IT4IT’s emphasis on continuous improvement and value delivery. Use IT4IT’s structured workflows to implement these principles in specific contexts, such as service design or incident management.
2. Establish a Digital Value Network (DVN)
   Start by identifying the lifecycle stages of your digital products and map them to IT4IT’s DVN. Break your operations into the four functional groups (Plan, Build, Deliver, Run) and define the workflows within each. This provides a clear structure for managing activities and outcomes.
3. Define and Manage Digital Products
   Use IT4IT’s definition of Digital Products to unify your IT services, applications, and physical items under a single management framework. For each product, identify its dependencies, lifecycle stages, and required outcomes.
4. Adopt IT4IT’s Value Streams for Key Processes
   Implement IT4IT’s value streams as workflows for delivering value:
   • Use Explore to evaluate new ideas and align them with strategic goals.
   • Apply Integrate to ensure readiness for deployment, covering development, integration, and testing.
   • Leverage Release to automate delivery pipelines using CI/CD principles.
   • Implement Operate to monitor products in production and proactively address issues.
5. Align IT4IT with Existing Tools
   IT4IT is particularly effective when integrated with platforms like ServiceNow, which directly maps its Common Service Data Model (CSDM) to IT4IT. This enables automation, improves visibility, and ensures consistency across tools and processes.
6. Focus on Data Objects and Functional Components
   Manage critical data objects, such as Service Offers and Product Releases, using IT4IT’s detailed workflows. Functional components, such as portfolio management and monitoring tools, ensure that each aspect of the IT lifecycle is accounted for and optimized.

Advantages of IT4IT

Integrating IT4IT with ITIL 4 offers significant benefits, particularly in bridging the gap between high-level IT service management principles and practical implementation. ITIL provides an excellent framework for defining what needs to be done, but IT4IT delivers the how, offering a structured and prescriptive approach that ensures IT services are managed efficiently and effectively. Below are the key advantages of adopting IT4IT alongside ITIL 4:

1. Detailed Implementation Guidance
   One of the biggest challenges with ITIL is that it offers broad recommendations without specifying exactly how to implement them. IT4IT fills this gap by providing well-defined functional components, data objects, and value streams that guide organizations through the exact steps required to build, deliver, and manage IT services. This level of specificity allows IT teams to move beyond theoretical best practices and implement solutions in a consistent, repeatable manner.
2. End-to-End Lifecycle Management
   IT4IT structures IT operations around the Digital Value Network (DVN), ensuring that digital products and services are managed holistically from ideation to retirement. By organizing IT activities into four high-level functional groups (Plan, Build, Deliver, Run) and seven interconnected value streams, IT4IT enables seamless coordination across different IT functions. This helps eliminate silos, improve collaboration, and create a single source of truth for IT service management.
3. Standardization and Flexibility
   IT4IT is vendor-neutral, making it highly adaptable to different IT environments. Unlike frameworks tied to specific technologies or platforms, IT4IT provides a universal reference architecture that can be used across various tools and ecosystems. This makes it particularly beneficial for organizations that leverage a mix of solutions such as ServiceNow, Jira, or cloud-based ITSM platforms. The structured approach helps rationalize toolsets, ensuring that all IT systems and processes work together in a coherent manner.
4. Support for Agile and DevOps
   Many modern IT organizations are embracing Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD methodologies to accelerate software delivery and improve responsiveness to business needs. IT4IT is designed to support these modern approaches by defining workflows, automating processes, and integrating development with operations. The Integrate, Release, and Deploy value streams in particular align closely with DevOps principles, making it easier for teams to continuously deliver and improve digital products.
5. Improved Visibility and Decision-Making
   IT4IT’s emphasis on data-driven management ensures that IT leaders have real-time insights into their digital products and services. By structuring IT operations around functional components and data objects, IT4IT enables better tracking of costs, performance, and service health. This allows IT teams to proactively identify risks, optimize resources, and improve service quality.
6. Seamless Integration with ITIL 4 and ServiceNow
   For organizations already using ITIL 4, IT4IT serves as a natural extension that provides the missing execution details. ServiceNow has embraced IT4IT’s principles by mapping its Common Service Data Model (CSDM) to IT4IT, meaning organizations can integrate IT4IT directly into their existing workflows. This makes it easier to automate service management processes, reduce manual effort, and enhance overall efficiency.
7. Continuous Improvement and Innovation
   The Evaluate value stream in IT4IT ensures that IT services are continuously assessed and refined to align with changing business needs. By incorporating feedback loops and structured performance evaluations, IT4IT enables organizations to proactively drive improvements, ensuring that IT operations remain relevant, efficient, and value-driven.

Without a doubt, the concept of service management remains based in ITIL 4. It is still the preferred framework for a holistic view of how we deliver services to our consumers. Its strength has always been its tool agnostic, outcomes-oriented guidance. But when greater detail is needed to rationalize tools and operational procedures, especially when working with ServiceNow, IT4IT provides much of that crucial “last mile” guidance that ITIL 4 suggests but does not define. We recommend taking a good hard look at IT4IT to augment and extend the work you are already doing with ITIL 4.