For those of you that don’t know, ITIL is the most widely recognized framework in the field of IT Service Management. It has been around and evolved over three decades continually adding and refining the body of knowledge over time. Something that any framework that wishes to remain relevant must do.

Recently two major changes have occurred which seem to have caused some concern and confusion in the IT Service Management community. First, examination institutes which had license to administer exams on behalf of Axelos have been consolidated into a single examination provider ; Peoplecert. To the end user or learner this may have been a bit of a surprise and could have been a little confusing if you were accustomed to dealing with certain examination organization. ITIL didn’t go away, just the options that learners previously had to sign up for testing did. From the user perspective, this most likely was not an issue.

Another change has happened. As a result of the consolidation effort, examination providers have partnered with other groups to promote awareness and testing of other service management frameworks which seem to have popped up over night like SIAM, VeriSM and other best practices like DevOps. A lot of time and effort is being put into marketing these frameworks and to show value in acquiring the various certifications within them. You may start hearing more about these and even could possibly see advertisements for this on web searches.

This is not a bad thing. One of the principles of capitalism is that competition is ultimately good for the consumer. As other frameworks emerge, ITIL will be forced to sharpen its approach to Service Management. These other options are slightly different from ITIL and would be easily be considered complimentary guidance. You or your organization does not have to choose to do either DevOps or ITIL. You could conceivably do both at the same time.

As new frameworks and practices emerge legacy frameworks must review their history, their current practices, as well as identify and incorporate new trends or they will fall out of favor and become obsolete.

Fortunately, the folks over at Axelos are doing just that. ITIL 2018 is being worked on which we believe should include include significant updates to processes, principles, refinement of the general approach, as well as the increased emphasis on a theme which has emerged within Axelos for other Best Practices they own which is tailoring ITIL to the needs of your organization. The ability to pull the bits and pieces from frameworks then mold them into the fabric of your culture is a big part of these updates which for many is a welcome addition.

ITIL itself isn’t going anywhere, it’s just going to be getting better with age. Competition and adoption require it to or it will cease to be relevant. As updates to ITIL 2018 are released, we will provide our insight. As for now, if you are on on the fence about learning or using ITIL because of changes you have seen or heard of, do not worry. ITIL will be around for quite some time and I expect it will be better than ever. The need from the business to create more value for money from IT is still the major challenge organizations face. To address that challenge, ITIL is still the best game in town.

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