Guiding Principles: These are recommendations on how to work, or make decisions, for example: focus on value, think and work holistically, or collaborate and promote visibility.
Governance: ITIL v3 covered Governance in the Service Strategy book focused on evaluating, directing and monitoring organisational performance but didn’t include it in the examinations. As a result, most practitioners weren’t exposed to the concept through training programmes. ITIL 4 repositions governance as a necessary component of the SVS that allows the provider to convert demand into value for one or more stakeholder.
Service value chain: This is a set of loosely coupled activities (or archetypes) that any service provider undertakes at some point (or even repeatedly). The service value chain is made up of six value chain activities – Plan, Engage, Design & Transition, Obtain/Build, Deliver & Support, and Improve.
Practices: One of the challenges with ITIL v3 was that although the guidance was quite vast (some might say too vast!), the reality was that most practitioners only saw small subsets, usually through the lens of training and exams or a consulting engagement. Thus, the world came to see ITIL as a process framework, which couldn’t be further from the truth! With ITIL 4, we moved the focus towards “practices”, which is a holistic view of the resources and capabilities needed to deliver service management work.
Continual improvement: The entire SVS is in scope for improvement! It’s not just practices that can be improved – the way the organization works and makes decisions can be improved; the way the provider evaluates, directs and monitors its performance can be improved; certainly, the way the organization converts demand to value can be improved.