Moving from ITIL 4 to ITIL (Version 5) – what organizations need to know and do

David Cannon – Senior Director, ITIL

Moving from one version of a best-practice framework to another requires professionals to train and certify. However, to realize the benefits of a new or evolved approach, organizations need to act too.

Why is this important and necessary?

Organizations require a strategy to manage emerging technologies that goes beyond the decisions that each separate department makes about the digital products and services it uses.

For example, a warehousing team might specify a technology solution that supports compliance with an online marketplace. Yet, the software may not integrate with customer service, finance, or other functions. This risks ignoring the importance of an end-to-end approach, therefore creating roadblocks, affecting handovers, and leading to inconsistent reporting.

Then there is the issue of balancing investment in new technology with legacy systems, the latter of which may still be critical to the business.

To counteract this, the organization needs an enterprise-wide strategy based on end-to-end value streams and alignment across technology decision-making. And this is an organizational responsibility and capability rather than an individual.

Strategic, organization-wide capabilities – such as capacity management, continuity management, and availability management – coordinate the work of many people. So, decisions about what capabilities are needed and how to acquire them rest with the organization.

And while individual employees need to understand and adopt the capabilities to support and contribute to the strategy, such as by training in ITIL, their actions alone won’t ensure the framework helps an organization meet its objectives.

Typical obstacles for organizations shifting from older to newer frameworks

Evolution within best-practice frameworks, including ITIL, reflects the changes and advances in the way organizations operate and provides new ways to manage those changes.

But the transition from older to newer best-practice approaches is, at best, not always smooth or, at worst, not pursued at all. But, above all, the main objective is to understand which up-to-date approaches will help manage organizational change caused by emerging technology.

While ITIL v3 was designed for the era of centralized IT departments acting as sole service providers, ITIL 4 spoke to the emergence of cloud technology and the ability of individual departments to procure digital products and services directly.

Inevitably, problems arose when organizations tried to maintain centralized IT, though critical, IT-related activities had already shifted to other business units. And, in this distributed use and management of technology, separate teams could choose a multitude of methods, creating inconsistency and the lack of an overarching framework.

Some estimates suggest a substantial proportion of what central IT departments used to do has moved elsewhere in organizations. Those who ignored this and failed to apply the necessary governance have ended up with heavily fragmented operations.

ITIL (Version 5) and the organizational imperative for a new world

ITIL (Version 5) is a wake-up call for organizations to recognize the need to bring the proliferation of tools, approaches, decentralization, and specialized silos under one umbrella. Therefore, it introduces a more explicit focus on digital product and service management and lifecycle needed to orchestrate them end-to-end.

But why?

Organizations need the ability to orchestrate end-to-end value for customers and users through digital product and service management. The key to this, as described in ITIL (Version 5), is the digital product and service management lifecycle.

This supports a shift in organizational approach: identifying activities that traditionally belonged to IT but now exist elsewhere in the business and managing them end-to-end. This includes understanding the value streams the lifecycle supports.

For example, a value stream might be a customer ordering a product that moves through finance, distribution, and manufacturing. The lifecycle and the value stream must be mapped to understand how digital technology supports the business.

Orchestration is also key for external providers, such as an outsourced service desk, which needs to be engaged during the design, acquire, build, and transition phases to ensure they learn how to support a new application. This means ensuring their efforts contribute to the same outcomes.

Key organizational actions to move effectively from one framework to another

1. Moving from one best practice framework to another: For example, from ITIL v3 or ITIL 4 to ITIL (Version 5) needs to be driven from the executive level, not grassroots: defining the operating model, governance and value streams in the organization. The executive must be visible and part of the project team – driving it, not just sponsoring it – and this is something that can’t be delegated to external providers or to AI because it requires accountability for organizational outcomes.

2. Develop metrics that stress end-to-end business outcomes: Entering a new market, increasing product sales, and so forth, rather than just measuring, for example, incident resolution.

3. Map services: What is the relationship between the action a human takes and the systems that support it? Map digital services and products to value streams and the people who design, build and support them. Answer critical questions such as “What is important? When is it needed? Is it being delivered?”

If organizations can, at the highest level, recognize the need to address the problem of managing digital products and services with an end-to-end lifecycle approach, they are more likely to ensure the sustainability of their businesses.