ITIL 4 vs ITIL V3: What’s New?

IT is at the core of every business in today’s world. This update will allow ITIL to reflect the fast-paced and complex environment we live in, and new ways of working and emerging practices, all of which are essential not only for ITSM professionals, but also for a wider range of professionals working in the digital transformation world.

The purpose of ITIL 4 is to provide organizations with comprehensive guidance for the management of information technology in the modern service economy.

ITIL 4 will evolve to provide an end-to-end IT/Digital Operating Model, covering the full delivery (and sustaining) of tech-enabled products and services, guiding how IT interfaces with, and even leads, the wider business strategy.

WHAT’S NEW?

ITIL® 4 has a series of new characteristics:

Holistic approach

ITIL 4 emphasizes a holistic approach by defining dimensions of service management that are collectively critical to the effective and efficient facilitation of value for customers and other stakeholders in the form of products and services. They consider elements such as organizations and people, partners and suppliers, information & technology and value streams & processes, all of which are relevant not only to IT services, but to IT service management as well.

Service value system

ITIL has evolved beyond the delivery of services to providing end-to-end value delivery. The focus is now on the co-creation of value through service relationship.

The updated framework will focus on facilitating value co-creation via a service value system (SVS). The SVS represents how different components and activities can work together, in any type of organization, to facilitate value creation through IT enabled services. In ITIL 4, customers are an essential element in the process of creating value.

Service value chain

Incorporated within the SVS is the service value chain (SVC). The service value chain is the set of interconnected activities that, when sequenced in the right way, provides an operating model for the creation, delivery, and continual improvement of services. The service value chain allows an organization to define a number of variants of these sequences known as value streams, of which the v3 service lifecycle is one such example. The service value chain is flexible and can be adapted to multiple approaches, including product-focused delivery teams, DevOps, and centralized IT. The adaptability of the value chain enables organizations to react to changing demands from their stakeholders in the most effective and efficient ways.

ITIL practices

What is currently known and described in ITIL v3 as ITIL processes will be a fundamental part of ITIL 4 framework and will expand their architecture to also consider other elements such as roles, skills, people and resources. These will be referred to as ITIL practices in ITIL 4. The ITIL practices described in ITIL 4 will maintain the value and the importance provided by the current ITIL processes, whilst at the same time expand to be integrated to different areas of service management and IT, from demand to value. The ITIL 4 framework will reinforce a flexible and non-siloed approach for the application of ITIL practices. 

Integration with other practices and new ways of working

ITIL 4 will reflect other frameworks and integrate with new ways of working including Agile, DevOps, Lean, IT governance and leadership. It will provide the flexibility needed to adopt and adapt what is relevant to each business and organization while reinforcing the fundamentals for delivering IT service quality. All of this sets ITIL and service management in a strategic context, bringing together ITSM, Development, Operations, business relationships and governance in a holistic approach. This is a truly integrated model for digital service management.

Guiding principles

The ITIL guiding principles, firstly introduced in ITIL Practitioner, will be at the core of ITIL 4. They will evolve to keep providing guidance to organizations in their work as they adopt a service management approach across the organization and adapt ITIL guidance to their own specific needs and circumstances, including continual improvement at all levels.

Four dimensions

To support a holistic approach to service management, ITIL also defines four dimensions that collectively are critical to the effective and efficient facilitation of value for customers and other stakeholders in the form of products and services. The four dimensions represent perspectives which are relevant to the whole service value system. All apply to both service management and to the services being managed across the whole organization.

ITIL 3 vs. ITIL 4 – The main differences

The main difference in ITIL 4 is its approach to IT Service Management. ITIL 4 places emphasis on adaptability to changes in the business and technology, by incorporating Agile, DevOps, and Lean concepts with traditional ITIL best practices to make an ITSM framework better equipped to evolve along with the industry.

Another significant change is the addition of the Service Value System. The SVS shifts the focus to value creation, from ITIL v3’s focus on the services themselves. The reasoning for this change is that by focusing on value creation, IT Service Management activities will now work in conjunction with other activities throughout the business, thereby promoting holistic systems thinking, breaking down silos, and encouraging collaboration.

Overall, ITIL 4 updates and modernizes existing ITSM knowledge; but it does retain many relevant aspects of previous ITIL versions. The table below summarizes some of the notable differences between the two versions.

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ITIL V3 26 Processes  Vs ITIL V4 34 Practices

ITIL V3 vs ITIL V4 Qualification Roadmap

This brings us to the end of this article on ITIL® V3 vs ITIL® V4.

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