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Author  Marcel Foederer – Master Trainer, ITpreneurs

May 21, 2018 |

 3 min read

  • Blog
  • Agile
  • IT Services
  • Value
  • AgileSHIFT
  • ITIL

Marcel Foederer is part of the AXELOS Lead Architect Team (LAT), responsible for guiding this year’s ITIL update.

In this blog post he looks both backwards and forwards, considering where ITIL has come from and where it’s going:

How has ITIL® changed in the past 20 years or more?

I was one of the first people in Holland to be ITIL-certified back in 1996 and have been training people in ITIL for at least 14 years.

Looking back to the first version and second versions of ITIL, it was much more IT-focused and with fewer, strong links with the wider business. This changed in 2007 when the lifecycle approach created a more powerful connection between IT departments and the organizations they support.

Today, there’s no denying that business and IT has changed beyond recognition and so the time has come to update ITIL again.

The high-performing IT organization

Now, I believe businesses want a more flexible IT organization providing higher velocity and even higher quality performance. The main point of adopting ITIL is to help IT organizations move at the speed that the business needs, while aligning the framework with other methods such as Agile, DevOps and with Cloud computing.

We will be looking to produce practical guidance to help demonstrate how ITIL can help meet these business challenges.

Culture change

However, the challenge and frustration within companies is often based on the absence of the right culture to change: management both in IT and elsewhere within organizations is not always willing to adopt and adapt new ideas.

Management has a tendency to control everything, caused by a lack of trust in staff members. This needs to change, to be less directive and to give people the freedom and authority to do the work.

Part of the ITIL update is about showing the connections with other frameworks and how service management should deliver and interface with other best practices.

Bringing new efficiency and effectiveness to IT

So, why should anybody be interested in the ITIL update?

Above all, I see it as bringing IT to the next level of efficiency and effectiveness by using new techniques. The aim is to align ITIL with other methods and design the value chain to work with lean, IT4IT, DevOps and agile.

The aim is also to give people sufficient detail to allow a broader perspective and help them to understand their role in the whole picture.

This concept of having a role in the value chain is broader than IT service management, encouraging development and operations to work more closely together and to demonstrate to all departments outside IT that there is a need to work in a more integrated way.

Thinking back 20 years, I couldn’t have imagined today’s world of IT and business. And – for organizations – it’s not a question of “we use ITIL or something else”: they should be applying best practices from a number of frameworks. The strength is using a combination to meet the needs of IT and the business.

Having a tribal approach about best practice creates a siloed mentality, which is the opposite of what’s good for any organization.

More Axelos Blog Posts about the ITIL Update

ITIL® Update: Mapping IT services with ITIL to drive business value

ITIL® Update: New effective ways of applying old ideas

ITIL® Update: Putting principles before process

ITIL® Update: IT Service Management Evolved

ITIL® Update: Evolution and Integration

Read more Axelos Blogs from Marcel Foederer

Observe Directly: how to avoid the “watermelon effect”

Why a service mindset is essential in 2016

ITIL Practitioner: the new stand-out certification