Version 2 moved the needle forward, focusing around the alignment of IT services with business requirements and offering best practices for applications management, support, delivery and security. Best Practice for Business Perspective: The IS View on Delivering Services to the Business was added to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) in version 2.

The next step in helping mature these relationships will be centered around business-IT integration, the goal being to achieve a level of synergy so seamless that business won’t be disrupted when architecture or processes undergo change.

One of the ways ITIL version 3 will help organizations achieve that seamless integration is by promoting a lifecycle approach to IT service management across books, from an overall perspective of service strategy to service design, service transition, service operations, and continual service improvement.

Avoiding Silos

That’s a departure, says Ken Turbitt, global best practices director at BMC Software, a provider of business service management and network and systems management software.

“The old [ITIL] books were done in such a way that you could pick and choose which elements you should align with,” he says. So, if an organization thought it was doing well with change management, but knew it had issues with problem management and release management processes, it could focus solely on those two areas. But "what happened a lot is that the elements were done in silos, and done in isolation. The integration of the processes across the whole was very sporadic,” Turbitt says.

Today (Jan. 22) marked the deadline for ITIL version 3 reviewers, including Turbitt, to submit comments on the updates. It still will be months before the books’ publication — April at the earliest. In the meantime, organizations that have already started on their ITIL journeys needn’t put the brakes on those ventures. In fact, businesses that have begun to move toward ITIL are in a good position to adopt Version 3’s innovations. How will ITIL version 3 impact business-technology alignment?

Version 2 moved the needle forward, focusing around the alignment of IT services with business requirements and offering best practices for applications management, support, delivery and security. Best Practice for Business Perspective: The IS View on Delivering Services to the Business was added to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) in version 2.

The next step in helping mature these relationships will be centered around business-IT integration, the goal being to achieve a level of synergy so seamless that business won’t be disrupted when architecture or processes undergo change.

One of the ways ITIL version 3 will help organizations achieve that seamless integration is by promoting a lifecycle approach to IT service management across books, from an overall perspective of service strategy to service design, service transition, service operations, and continual service improvement.

Avoiding Silos

That’s a departure, says Ken Turbitt, global best practices director at BMC Software, a provider of business service management and network and systems management software.

“The old [ITIL] books were done in such a way that you could pick and choose which elements you should align with,” he says. So, if an organization thought it was doing well with change management, but knew it had issues with problem management and release management processes, it could focus solely on those two areas. But "what happened a lot is that the elements were done in silos, and done in isolation. The integration of the processes across the whole was very sporadic,” Turbitt says.

Today (Jan. 22) marked the deadline for ITIL version 3 reviewers, including Turbitt, to submit comments on the updates. It still will be months before the books’ publication — April at the earliest. In the meantime, organizations that have already started on their ITIL journeys needn’t put the brakes on those ventures. In fact, businesses that have begun to move toward ITIL are in a good position to adopt Version 3’s innovations.
How will ITIL version 3 impact business-technology alignment?

Version 2 moved the needle forward, focusing around the alignment of IT services with business requirements and offering best practices for applications management, support, delivery and security. Best Practice for Business Perspective: The IS View on Delivering Services to the Business was added to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) in version 2.

The next step in helping mature these relationships will be centered around business-IT integration, the goal being to achieve a level of synergy so seamless that business won’t be disrupted when architecture or processes undergo change.

One of the ways ITIL version 3 will help organizations achieve that seamless integration is by promoting a lifecycle approach to IT service management across books, from an overall perspective of service strategy to service design, service transition, service operations, and continual service improvement.

Avoiding Silos

That’s a departure, says Ken Turbitt, global best practices director at BMC Software, a provider of business service management and network and systems management software.

“The old [ITIL] books were done in such a way that you could pick and choose which elements you should align with,” he says. So, if an organization thought it was doing well with change management, but knew it had issues with problem management and release management processes, it could focus solely on those two areas. But "what happened a lot is that the elements were done in silos, and done in isolation. The integration of the processes across the whole was very sporadic,” Turbitt says.

Today (Jan. 22) marked the deadline for ITIL version 3 reviewers, including Turbitt, to submit comments on the updates. It still will be months before the books’ publication — April at the earliest. In the meantime, organizations that have already started on their ITIL journeys needn’t put the brakes on those ventures. In fact, businesses that have begun to move toward ITIL are in a good position to adopt Version 3’s innovations.
“Version 2 is just as valid, depending on what you do for your organization,” Turbitt says. “If you understand the various functions [of version 2], it’s easier to take a lifecyle approach to the functions, vs. documenting them all over again. It’s not a major jolt or shift in the market because implementing ITIL is not a short project.”

At the most, some organizations may slow down their current implementations, as they investigate how to use some of the new information.

One question that may come up for users is the role of the CMDB (configuration management database) in ITIL 3, which Turbitt says is being renamed the Configuration Management System. Turbitt speculates that the renaming will be related to promoting the CMDB from a dumb database with good structure to something operational, with the inclusion of analytical tools surrounding the database, data collection tools to bring in information, and reconciliation tools for data integrity; as he terms it, “a collection of applications and processes that make that database live.”

And if that’s the case, he believes BMC is well-positioned with its Atrium CMDB product, which includes database tools, a reconciliation engine, the CMDB, and analytics for reporting against it.

Most vendors will need to make some enhancements to their architectures or bring in new capabilities to address ITIL version 3’s lifecycle approach. While BMC has already designed its business service management products to support the lifecycle approach, Turbitt says he expects his company will have to do some new development or acquisition in one area to support Version 3 requirements, which he declined to name.

In the meantime, BMC this quarter expects to roll out a service request system that will make change management more accessible to users via web-based, standard requests for services (such as user provisioning). Also on the schedule in this timeframe is a product aimed at transaction management.