The Tectonic Shift from ITIL v3 to ITIL 4
The shift from ITIL v3 to ITIL 4 is not a small one. Those who have gone through ITIL 4 Foundation training are having a fundamentally different conversation than those who have only been exposed to ITIL v3; the mindset with which we approach ITIL concepts, and the major areas of focus, have shifted dramatically. It’s important that anyone working in technology-focused organizations and using ITIL concepts be up to date on what the new version says about how we can best deliver products and services to our clients.
This article provides an overview of the changes and additions to the ITIL library that ITIL 4 has brought about and how these changes have impacted and/or vary from what you learned in ITIL v3.
A Quick Comparison of ITIL v3 and ITIL 4 Themes
If you, like me, have found that your attention span has shrunk to the size of a very small pea, I am here to help. Directly below is the tl;dr version of the major changes – be ready to say goodbye to some cornerstone ITIL v3 concepts:
- Moving away from “delivering” value – say goodbye to delivering value (seeing as it’s our customers, not us, who determine whether or not something has value anyway) and say hello to co-creating and co-shaping value in close collaboration with our customers and users of products and services.
- Moving away from a focus on processes – say goodbye to the 26 ITIL v3 process and hello to the 4 Dimensions of Service Management and 34 ITIL 4 practices. There’s a lot more to ITIL 4 than there was to ITIL v3, but the shift in focus is a healthy and important one. There’s now a lot more emphasis on the bigger picture of creating relevant, valuable, and transformative change within our organizations and helping our customers do the same. For the first time ever in the ITIL books, there is content around how we implement ITIL concepts and the mindset we should have when doing so. This topic of mindset is covered as part of the new ITIL 4 Guiding Principles.
- Moving away from organizational silos – say goodbye to the ITIL v3 Service Lifecycle (which, unfortunately, further entrenched silos in how we worked) and hello to “systems thinking” and the Service Value System and Service Value Chain, which focus squarely on enabling and co-creating value.
- Moving away from fixed roles – say goodbye to several of the roles in ITIL v3 (process owners and managers, etc.) and hello to more fluid roles, responsibilities, skills, and capabilities throughout teams and the overall organization.
- Moving away from the traditional IT department – say goodbye to the traditional picture of IT serving the rest of the organization and hello to all of us working together to serve our customers. Instead of “divide and conquer”, the goal is to “combine and conquer” in service of our customers. ITIL 4 explores several modern ways of working, such as cross-functional teams, Product Backlogs, and Kanban boards.
To help you keep these changes in mind at a high level, download our “What’s New in ITIL 4” infographic, which provides a short summary (and cute picture) of the changes we covered above in brief. The remainder of this blog article digs into some of the specifics in these areas and points you toward helpful articles and other resources to learn more.
There’s a Lot of New Material in the ITIL 4 Framework
As we’ve seen so far, many ITIL v3 concepts have been sunsetted with the release of ITIL 4, replaced with newer, better versions. In fact, 80% of the content that’s discussed during the first day of a 2-day ITIL 4 Foundation course is completely new for our ITIL v3 Foundation students. It’s only when we get into the ITIL 4 practices (which our ITIL v3 people will recognize as processes) where ITIL 4 concepts start to feel familiar.
I’m even starting to hear frustrations from those who are ITIL 4 certified, as some of the biggest obstacles in bringing meaningful and lasting change to their organizations have been the people who are certified in ITIL v3 and think they know how to “do ITIL.” Unfortunately, ITIL has changed, and many well-meaning ITIL v3 “experts” are, without realizing it, going to be left behind.
A Difference in Mindset between ITIL v3 and ITIL 4 Foundation Students
Core concepts and the somewhat prescriptive nature of process workflows on fundamental ITIL v3 processes like Incident, Problem, and Change Management have gone away in ITIL 4, replaced by the strategies and methods leading organizations are successfully experimenting with now. There are fewer step-by-step examples throughout the library and more tailoring of concepts needed within organizations. These fundamental changes have forced the mindset of ITIL 4 students to change towards more holistic, executive level thinking in how we bring value and remain relevant to our customers.
If you’re looking to leave an ITIL 4 Foundation class with the ability to put a process in place, for example, you will be sadly disappointed. However, the ITIL 4 course provides something even better: it equips students with the ability to think about our organizations and customers from the big picture, ecosystem perspective of working and collaborating across teams to make great products and services in the first place.
Students in an ITIL 4 Foundation class end up having different, more meaningful conversations around driving change, interacting and communicating with those around them, and developing the skills and strategy needed to remain relevant in today’s digital landscape. These kinds of conversations often did not happen in an ITIL v3 class because the focus was squarely on remembering the Service Lifecycle phases and the processes contained within each phase. We’re also starting to see a lot more IT leaders and non-IT students in our ITIL 4 Foundation and advanced classes as the concepts in ITIL 4 apply more broadly than they ever have before.
The Move Away from ITIL Versioning
There’s a reason ITIL 4 isn’t “v4” a la v2 and v3. The main reason being is that the ITIL library speaks to technology’s fourth industrial revolution. More on the reasoning behind the ITIL 4 name change in this article referenced here. Also, fun fact, ITIL isn’t even an acronym anymore – the Information Technology Infrastructure Library is no more. It’s now just “ITIL”. These are minor changes, really, but worth noting. Let’s now get back to some of the bigger, more impactful changes in the ITIL 4 library.
The Content in Several ITIL v3 Processes (now called Practices) Has Changed Too
Even though several of the ITIL 4 practices sound like the names you’re familiar with from v3, many of them are now quite different in terms of the content contained within. Let’s look at a few examples.
Change Management Changes
This v3 process, now termed the Change Enablement practice, has changed significantly in ITIL 4. The biggest change is the dismantling of the idea of using a Change Advisory Board (CAB) as a one-size-fits-all approach to managing risk and reviewing requests for change. There are a lot of new ways to manage change that are used regularly, particularly in Agile and DevOps organizations, to help teams move quickly and safely through change (peer reviews, automated testing, etc.). It’s vital to understand these new ways of working.
Incident and Knowledge Management Changes
Processes that seemed pretty straightforward in ITIL v3 like Incident Management and Knowledge Management have changed a lot as well. Instead of a simple, step-by-step guide on how to manage incidents (identify, log, categorize, and prioritize), the new practice guide is full of more modern ideas on how to best manage incidents, including approaches like intelligent swarming.
The Knowledge Management practice no longer covers the stages of knowledge (data, information, knowledge, and wisdom), instead it shares how knowledge can be effectively captured and communicated within and across teams and extolls the many virtues of continuous learning.
Service Level Management Changes
The Service Level Management practice is another seemingly straightforward ITIL v3 process that has gone through a lot of changes. For example, Operating Level Agreements (OLAs) and Underpinning Contracts (UCs) have gone away. These concepts were confusing in v3, so they were dropped from ITIL 4. However, the concept of Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) has been added. Here’s an overview of the changes to the Service Level Management Practice Guide.
It’s definitely worth taking an ITIL 4 Foundation course, as, subsequently, you will be able to download electronic copies of all of the 34 ITIL 4 practices for free for one year. After the first year, you’d pay $50 a year to have access to AXELOS’ ITIL 4 online resources as part of the My ITIL program.
ITIL 4 and the Inclusion of Agile, Lean, and DevOps
There is a ton of information in the ITIL 4 library about current ways of working, and fascinating tools and techniques like the Simian Army, Toyota Kata, Psychological Safety, Value Stream Mapping, Continuous Integration, Development and Deployment (CI/CD), DevSecOps, and more. For more on this, here’s an overview of ITIL 4 and its integration with Agile/Scrum, Lean, DevOps, and Digital Transformation concepts.
Two Drawbacks around How the ITIL 4 Material is Organized
For the past two years I have lived and breathed ITIL 4, as I was fortunate to serve as one of the lead editors and co-authors of the official Digital and IT Strategy publication (or as we lovingly call it, DITS). To ensure nothing we wrote for DITS conflicted with or repeated concepts in the other books, I ended up reading all of the other ITIL 4 publications and reviewing several ITIL 4 practice guides. That experience provided me with insight into ITIL 4 as a whole – the good (and great!), along with a few drawbacks, which I’ll get into here.
It is a Massive Library of Information Published in Multiple Formats
It took me over a year of consistent reading, researching, and learning to become deeply familiar with the ITIL 4 content and I’ve still only read maybe 12 of the 34 practices. I’m also more of a print book reader (versus e-book), so it’s taken me a bit longer to make my way through the individual practice guides (and, frankly, some of them, being version one, are much better than others). As of now, several of them are just sitting on my laptop waiting to be read.
On the upside, electronic materials are easier to update, and the plan is to revise the practices in some fashion every year (rather than waiting every decade or more, which definitely wasn’t working well). The downside is that material is scattered across different formats, and there’s a lot of new information in the materials that didn’t exist before. Thus, it’s a much larger body of material to have to learn. Even so, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to undertake.
Some Information is Scattered across Multiple Publications
Another drawback I noticed in the ITIL 4 material is that knowledge in specific areas is scattered across several books and practice guides. As a result, it’s a bit more difficult to find and synthesize all of the information around a specific topic. For example, the Direct, Plan, and Improve (DPI) publication, Digital and IT Strategy (DITS) publication, and the Measurement and Reporting Practice Guide all discuss the topic of measurement, metrics, and reporting. However, they each cover slightly different angles of the topic. The DPI publication talks about Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in depth whereas the DITS publication discusses the fascinating topic of Objectives and Key Results or OKRs. Thus, to get a full picture, you’d want to read all three resources and/or take the two courses.
Where to learn more – Buying the ITIL 4 Books and Taking the Classes
Let’s talk about how to learn more about ITIL 4. Buying the suite of ITIL books and/or taking all of the ITIL 4 courses is not an insignificant investment. The books are decently large (each one about 200 pages in length) and contain beautiful, full-color diagrams throughout. But make no mistake, they can be pricey.
That said, there are some things that can help with the financial burden. First, if you use the promo code AR21 at checkout, you can get any of the ITIL 4 books at 20% off the regular price at TSO’s website until the end of 2021. Also, Beyond20 offers ITIL 4 Training Passports that are a 25% cost savings over buying individual courses – the passport is good for up to two years. Whatever way you end up learning more about ITIL 4, the investment is worthwhile; I see it transform and improve the lives of individuals, leaders, and organizations worldwide every day.
The Need for All of Us to Change
There are many other changes in ITIL 4 outside of the examples contained in this article, and if you are working in any part of IT Service Management, there’s value in understanding those changes and learning what leading organizations are doing in each area that impacts you. Unfortunately, the information in ITIL v3 is now well over than a decade old, and it’s time for a knowledge refresh on ideas that will help us, our teams, and our organizations succeed both now and into the future.