Modernizing ITSM with ITIL 4: Change enablement

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a customer-centric framework that promotes governance, collaboration, and continuous improvement. At a time when IT service management (ITSM) is changing with new technology, shifting regulatory requirements, and decentralized teams, this is vital.

We explored how the ITIL 4 service value system helps ITSM service providers generate business value through the creation, delivery, and continuous improvement of services. Now let’s look at ITIL 4 guidance on change enablement.

Swift change demands an agile response

ITSM leaders encounter intense pressure during times of change. They must swiftly adapt to business demands while maintaining exceptional service standards to minimize disruptions, cut operational costs, and improve employee experiences.

Change waits for no one. Whether correcting, preventing, maintaining, or enhancing services, ITSM service providers must regularly evaluate how they’ll respond to both the expected and the unexpected.

Organizations ill-equipped for change expose themselves to critical errors that can disrupt their service operations. From service outages and outdated governance to sluggish adoption and dissatisfied employees, the risks are many—and can be overwhelming.

Evaluating a change management strategy is more than deconstructing processes or identifying risks. ITIL 4 challenges organizations to reconceptualize change management, beginning with acknowledging its past shortcomings.

Transformation of change management

Change management has been a focal point within ITIL since the beginning. However, previous versions placed emphasis on established processes, making the change management approach overly bureaucratic and inflexible.

One suggestion was for organizations to establish a change advisory board—a designated group of people responsible for providing guidance on changes to IT service operations. In the past, change advisory boards often became approval bodies for organizations, resulting in misaligned priorities, delays, and backlogged requests.

This rigid and unwieldy framework contrasts with today’s agile and efficiency-driven business landscape, which favors cross-functional collaboration, business value transparency, and streamlined strategies.

To align with modern business standards, ITIL 4 did more than offer a superficial makeover of change management. It fundamentally reconstructed the underpinnings of the system—starting with a name change.

Change enablement: From process to guidance

Change enablement adheres to ITIL 4's overarching shift from strict processes to adaptable best practices to deliver exceptional organizational outcomes.

The Change Enablement ITIL 4 Practice Guide defines change enablement as the means “to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the schedule change.”

When deployed correctly, change enablement:

1. Uses technology and automation to analyze risks and accelerate deployment speed
2. Implements an all-encompassing communication strategy that underscores benefits and cultivates high adoption rates
3. Empowers all personnel to champion change initiatives

ITIL and DevOps together for change

ITIL's change enablement system acknowledges its valuable relationship with DevOps by prioritizing customer value, fostering collaboration, promoting continual improvement, and incorporating Agile and lean methodologies. They’re the perfect pair.

ITIL 4 places special emphasis on key DevOps principles that expedite the change lifecycle:

• Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) methods as an effective and efficient change-delivery model
• Safe-to-fail testing to create an environment in which innovation and failure are accepted
• Feedback loops to catch quality issues early and often
• Agile-inspired change authority roles and delegated authority, enabling a team to act as both the change manager and implementer

Automation serves as the binding force for ITIL and DevOps, optimizing change enablement across the organization.

Changing at the speed of automation and AI

Automation streamlines laborious tasks throughout the change lifecycle. This allows teams to concentrate on value-adding activities during the change assessment and approval processes.

Four pivotal automation principles from DevOps are integrated into the ITIL 4 best-practice guidance:

1. CI/CD: Automation-driven software changes encompass building, testing, and deployment, yielding frequent, rapid, and reliable releases.
2. Observability: Code changes that could disrupt deployments are identified, enhancing service reliability. Post-deployment issues trigger alerts to a consolidated solution, facilitating root-cause analysis for faster problem resolution.
3. Infrastructure as code: IT infrastructure mirrors the configuration management database (CMDB), driving change. Automation rectifies differences, boosting speed, consistency, and error reduction.
4. Issue monitoring and remediation: Log data and metrics fuel automatic issue detection and resolution across applications and infrastructure.

When used effectively, automation can simultaneously simplify and revolutionize processes. Hitachi Energy, for example, created a consolidated IT environment for its 42,000 employees using the Now Platform to automate workflows and transition to a single employee service center model.

The rise of generative AI accentuates the power of automation within change management. The Now Platform Vancouver release introduced Now Assist, which optimizes workflows and improves team productivity.

The innovation uses generative AI and large language models (LLMs) trained on an organization’s data to analyze incidents for similarities, summarize Virtual Agent discussions, and automate resolution notes that adhere to best practices.

Change the way you think about ITSM

As ITSM service providers navigate the rolling terrain of global businesses, embracing modern change enablement practices can put them on a path to success. ITIL 4's evolution from process-centricity to adaptable guidance and alignment with DevOps principles empowers organizations to respond nimbly to change, using automation as the linchpin for seamless adaptation.

Whether you’re fielding increasing customer demands, implementing new technology, or reducing costs, discover how ITIL 4 can help your organization thrive when it matters most.

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