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.
Traditional Change Advisory Boards help organizations govern production changes, but they introduce bureaucracy, delays, and unclear accountability. Troy Kinsey lays out a modern alternative: asynchronous, responsibility-driven approvals based on defined ownership, targeted oversight, and operational readiness. The article walks through what this looks like once you’ve moved past the CAB, and what it takes to get there.
What is service management, really? Daniel Breston’s answer isn’t a framework, and it doesn’t need one. It’s a single question, picked up from his first CEO walking a Houston bank with a Post-it pad. This article unpacks the question, why it still works four decades later, and why frameworks keep failing to capture what it captures immediately.
Lynda Cooper has edited ISO 20000 for more than a decade. Her explanation for why the standard has stayed useful for twenty years is also her clearest answer to the question people keep getting wrong about it: standards tell you what to do, not how to do it. The how is what frameworks like ITIL are for, and this article walks through where each one fits.
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.
Mathies Wähner on why Agentic AI fails in ITSM. Drop it into an operating model that isn’t ready and it doesn’t make you smarter, just faster at being wrong, while quietly removing the people who used to catch the mistakes. The real question isn’t how to implement Agentic AI, but whether your operating model can survive it once it’s running at scale.
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.
IT support teams often spend all their time reacting to issues – resetting passwords, restoring services, responding to issues (incidents), and managing major incidents such as outages. In this article, learn how problem management helps eliminate root causes, reduce repeat incidents, lower costs, and shift IT from firefighting to prevention.
Most organizations overestimate what a single CMDB “transformation” can do and underestimate the power of a stream of small, compounding design and automation decisions. This article explains the benefits of the latter over the former.
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.
What happened to ITSM evangelists? Explore why they disappeared, the value they brought, and why the ITSM industry needs them more than ever in 2026.