While it will remain known as ITIL that will be more of a brand than an acronym, according to ITIL v3 chief architect, Sharon Taylor. The framework of best practices will now be known as the IT Service Management Practices.
This isn’t just about IT, we have to make IT smaller, said Taylor. It’s been a victim of its success in terms of being an ‘infrastructure library’. While the term library adequately describes the series of books on best practices, infrastructure undermines the depth and breadth of the ITIL approach.
Part of our objective is to move ITIL into the boardroom, said Taylor. More and more often I’m being asked to talk at CxO events. Historically ITIL has been a grassroots discovered pathway. Now it’s also being looked at at high levels of the organization because it’s being looked at as a mechanism to solve business challenges.
First developed in the late 80s by the UK government’s procurement vehicle, the Central Communications and Telecom Agency (since superseded by the OGC), ITIL been widely adopted by both commercial and public-sector organizations as the leading standard for best practice in the provision of IT services.
Taylor said Version 3 has been under development since late 2005 and is due to reinforce its core IT management strengths with a focus on boardroom applicability, IT professionalism, and multi-cultural and multi-language support.
We’re seeing ITIL integration into formal business service management. The line is becoming diminished between BSM and ITSM, she said, noting that the ITIL architects and authors nearly went further in evolving the framework from its toots in information technology. We talked about dropping IT from ITIL and there was a great debate about doing that. We made a choice to stay with IT service management but talk about not needing to use IT.
ITIL remains the core brand and will be updated on May 30 with the release of the core practice titles covering service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation, and continual service improvement.
The five core titles will be accompanied by topic-specific complementary guides, and an integrated service lifecycle model, while there will also be a new higher level of certification to reflect the increased focus on service management.
There are certain gaps today with certification. Part of what we have to promote is IT process professionalism, said Taylor. There is a new higher level of certification with a focus on overall service management. We need to move ahead.
Taylor was speaking at an event organized by service management software vendor Axios Systems, which welcomed the evolution of ITIL toward service management.
The service providers should provide services that are appropriate to the business, so this communication between IT and the business is a critical part of ITIL version 3, said Markos Symeonides, Axios VP of business development.
