Are companies using ITIL4?

In recent months, new editions of the main service management frameworks and standards have been published: ITIL4, ISO/IEC 20000-1: 2018, CobiT 2019, VeriSM, etc. However, the main analysts show that most organizations still follow approaches based on ITIL v3/ITIL 2011.

¿When will ITIL4 be put into practice?

The arrival of ITIL4 has not sufficiently permeated the day to day of companies just yet. Perhaps, that is because for the first time in its four editions, Axelos has not published the entire document at the at once. Instead, it decided to publish the Foundation certification manual first. It was only several months later, already in 2020, that some of the “practice guides” began to appear. The practices replace what were previously called processes.

By the end of May 2020, Axelos had finally published all 34 ITIL4 practices. Only from this moment could there be a general reception by companies. Axelos has chosen to prioritize certification itineraries rather than publishing its updated corpus.

Is there maturity in the implementation of ITSM processes/practices?

As for the current implementation of ITSM processes/practices, except for a few notable cases, the picture is quite homogeneous. Service management is fundamentally associated with the implementation of a service desk tool, and it focuses on incident management processes and service requests. From there, each organization may implement other processes, such as change, configuration or problem management, depending on its needs. Few organizations (only those with an ISO 20000 management system) extend this implementation to other processes not mentioned above.

Recent market analysis shows that this diagnosis will not change in the short term. ITIL v3 and ISO 20000 will continue to be the most widely used guides. Besides, it does not seem that service management will be generalized beyond the aforementioned processes. Other frameworks such as IT4IT or VeriSM, which are the ideal complement to ITIL and ISO 20000, will not be considered either.

Still, the market keeps evolving, and there are a number of trends that are becoming more and more popular. To the ubiquitous DevOps, Agile or BlockChain we must now add trends such as microservice architecture, containers, or infrastructure as code.

To what extent do these new trends affect service management?

In the article service management in an agile world, we delve deeper into how the main service management frameworks are trying to respond to these trends.

How to align the product-centric philosophy of agile methodologies with the classic service-centric philosophy of service management? That is probably the biggest challenge that service management will face in the coming years. In fact, in a recent article, Gartner says that “in the future, there will no longer be a distinction between Agile, DevOps and project teams. There will be a product-centric value stream with a special focus on value for the customer.”

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