ITIL Articles

Every digital product carries a cost, but few organizations can say what that cost is, let alone what drives it. ITIL 4’s Service Financial Management practice turns spending on people, technology, suppliers, and process into information leaders can act on. This article looks at how the practice builds cost models, plans budgets, and why the answer differs depending on whether IT is core to the business or a supporting function.
Iran is rich in oil and gas, yet poor governance has held its technology sector back. A MedaNet practitioner with two decades of ITIL experience there argues the real problem was never a shortage of equipment; it was buying systems without managing them. Drawing on work across banks, oil and gas, and petrochemical companies, the article sets out why ITIL matters as a discipline for using what you already own.
ITIL 4’s Business Analysis Management practice takes an organization from a vague problem to a justified, costed solution. Stakeholder needs get sorted into utility, warranty, and experience before two processes turn them into an agreed approach and a recommended option. The business analyst now sits inside the product team as often as beside it, and owns requirements for the life of the solution.
PeopleCert calls it ITIL (Version 5), but Stephen Mann ran a LinkedIn poll to see what ITSM practitioners really call it, and the official name came in third. ITIL 5 took 41% of the vote, ITIL v5 pulled 26%, and the branded name only 22%. Stephen looks at why the shortcuts are winning, and why the official name probably won’t catch up.
Christian Nissen spent four decades in IT service management and helped shape ITIL along the way. In his Conversations with Giants episode, he makes the case that the industry keeps isolating capabilities it should be reintegrating, that it has swapped service for product, and that the skills worth learning are older and plainer than newcomers expect. Here are the ideas practitioners can use now.
Most teams still bolt security on at the end, then act surprised when the audit goes badly. Alex Harding makes the case for Security Stories, negative “what if” scenarios written from the attacker’s viewpoint and dropped straight into the backlog, so security gets designed in rather than retrofitted. A practical look at how the technique maps onto ITIL (Version 5) and where it fits into the design stage.
Somebody announces the death of service management every few years, and they’ve been doing it for 35 years now. Barclay Rae has heard every version and thinks they all miss the same thing: the job at the heart of service management is human, not technological. That’s why no new wave of tech has managed to kill it, and AI has made the case for it stronger.
Every few years, the IT industry settles on a new savior. Agile. Then DevOps. Now AI. Kaimar Karu argues organizations adopt each one without first knowing what they want from it, then act surprised when results don’t live up to the hype. In this episode of Roman Jouravlev’s Conversations with Giants series, Kaimar covers why AI should never be the goal in itself and the skills technology won’t replace.
Value is what the customer decides it is, not what the IT department or a framework says. It’s the test Stuart Rance has applied across a thirty-year career: would anyone on the receiving end say your work created value for them? In episode three of Conversations with Giants he explains why he hates tool replacement projects, and why using agentic AI to cut headcount is the wrong use of the technology.
When Askar Aituov joined as a Developer Experience consultant at one of Kazakhstan’s largest banks, with 700-plus engineers, he expected the usual challenges: stakeholder alignment, change resistance, legacy tooling. What he didn’t expect was to watch a mature ITIL 4 implementation quietly fail to deliver what it was supposed to. This article walks through what went wrong, and why.
For over 20 years, ITSM has repeated the same failures. Through the ABC cards, Paul Wilkinson has spent decades tracing how culture, leadership, and behavior consistently derail success, not tools or frameworks. AI is now the latest shiny thing being sold to organizations that haven’t fixed the underlying pattern. This article looks at why the industry still hasn’t learned, and what it would take.
ITIL (Version 5) describes the guiding principles as “recommendations that can guide an organization in all circumstances, regardless of changes in its goals, strategies, type of work, or management structure.” This article walks through what the principles are, how they’ve evolved from ITIL 4, and how ITSM leaders can put them to use today.
How would you rate your organization’s ITSM or ITIL adoption? Not just in terms of process or practice adoption, but in serving the parent business. PeopleCert has built an ITIL Performance Benchmarking Model with defined ways to calculate the key metrics. This article covers how the model works and how ITSM teams can get involved.
The release of the ITIL (Version 5) Foundation publication has brought new interest in what changed from ITIL 4. This article walks through 20 changes in ITIL (Version 5) compared to ITIL 4, including updates to the Value System, the new certification paths, AI governance, and how the framework now handles the practices practitioners already know.
Much changed in ITIL 4, and there’s a lot to get your head around. This article explains what the ITIL 4 service value system is and what it contains: the guiding principles, governance, service value chain, management practices, and continual improvement. It also covers how the SVS evolves in ITIL (Version 5) and what practitioners should watch for.