Since the release of ITIL v3 in 2007, I have seen widespread acceptance in the IT community of concepts relating to the Service Lifecycle, and lately, a growing adoption of parts of the ITIL V3. As organizations have reviewed and leveraged ITIL, a change log of requested changes has been collated which also includes feedback from the rest of the community. Leveraging best practices defined within the library itself a Change Advisory Board has been formed to actively review and manage the change log. Time has come to package up the log into a release and last week it was announced there will be a refresh of the Core ITIL Volumes.

Before there are any concerns, it is not another ITIL version, so ITIL V4 is not on the launch pad. Instead, this is an update to the core guidance based on experiences and feedback.

The objectives of this project include:

• Updating based on a number of issues raised in the Change Control Log.
• Remedy the inconsistencies that exist between the content and layout of the publications.
• Resolve some of the comments from the training community.
• To simplify the Service Strategy publication to ensure that the concepts are readily understood and that the content is accessible to a greater number of users.

There is a particular proposed intitiative that excites me and hopefully will answer many concerns I have heard in the field in relation to roles, organization structures and the definition of roles. It has been identified that Roles will be made consistent across the books, ensuring that the activities apply only to one role – this was a real challenge for many organizations in the industry and linked to this will be the clarification of organization structures and role definitions.

There are many other areas that fall within scope and can I encourage you to take a few minutes to review the document released last week titled “OGC Mandate for Change - Project requirements for an update to the ITIL® core publications” released on the “best-management-practice website and let me know what you think?