Sunday, 26 January 2014

ITIL V3 2011 Edition compared with 2007 edition


For those who may not be aware, ITIL had undergone a review and the “ITIL V3 2011 edition” was released on 29 July 2011. The good news is that all the current certified ITIL V3 folks will not have to upgrade their certifications to the 2011 edition as this is just an update and not an upgrade (not a new version). Another reason for celebration is that the fundamental principles and concepts of lifecycle approach of V3 would still hold good.

Few major changes in the phases that have been incorporated under the 2011 edition as opposed to the 2007 edition of ITIL V3 are:
·         Service Strategy
o   It contains the newly defined process of strategy management for IT services. Business strategy and IT strategy are two different topics wherein business strategy defines IT strategy, and IT strategy supports business strategy (a more detailed explanation around Business Service Management)
o   Business relationship management and demand management are now covered as processes in Service Strategy. There are templates that describes each of the processes making their purposes easy to comprehend.
o   The entire world is taking about Cloud and how can our ITIL not be affected by it. There are explanations on how cloud impacts ITSM and few cloud concepts, types and components are also covered in it.
·         Service Design           
o   The ‘design coordination’ process has been added to clarify the flow of activity in the service design lifecycle stage.
o   More clarity on transition of a service from pipeline to catalogue to retired has been discussed.
·         Service Transition
o   An improved, structured, better interrelationships of the configuration management system (CMS) and service knowledge management system (SKMS) have been introduced to help understand the concepts better.
o   The evaluation process has been renamed ‘change evaluation’ with more clarity on the purpose of how to use this process.
·         Service Operation
o   Clarification on how basic events flow into filters and rule engines to produce meaningful information has been covered.
o   A new process flow has been introduced suggesting a set of activities and steps to be followed for the request fulfillment process, including the decision points for escalating requests to service transition as change proposals or incident management as incidents.
o   Clarification and difference between Application management and Application development has been highlighted along with the key activities of application management in each of the stages.
·         Continual service improvement
o   The concept of a continual service improvement register has been introduced to record improvement opportunities, categorize them, and identify effort required and potential benefits. The intention to gather this information is to determine and prioritize improvement initiatives.
o   CSI model has been renamed to CSI approach as it tasks about an approach to improvement of an IT service.

Few generic changes across the phases:
Quite interestingly, the 2011 contains lists of various inputs and outputs of the phases along with examples across the service life-cycle. This definitely makes all the life-cycle phases more cohesive and helps a user understand how the different life-cycle stages are interrelated.
Please take cognizance that there are quite a lot of minor changes in the 2011 edition but I have tried to list down all the major changes that in a way affects the way the ITIL V3 version has been used thus far.


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