There is a massive shift in terms of defining value between the two ITIL versions – v3 and 4. The difference is not correcting a faux pas but the lateral shift that the industry has undergone in the past decade.
ITIL V3’s service definition reads – a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.
Note that the service provider is delivering value to a customer. This was highly accepted and it was true even that service providers delivered value to customers. So what has changed in ITIL 4?
Definition of service in ITIL 4: a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.
The big difference is here in the way value is created. Value according to ITIL 4 is no longer created by the service provider alone. It is an effort of co-creation between the service provider and the customer.
This is a reality today that customers become part of the development and service teams and look at themselves as a part of the team that delivers value. Feedback from customers is constant and this helps in course direction and help create value.
In Agile and DevOps, every team that practices it has a customer representation in the form of a product owner who considers himself as a part of the development/service team and works in unison. Value is created by this team which is a true representation of collaboration between two entities. Likewise, it is not uncommon for multiple service providers to come together as a single team to create value.
Also remember that we live in a world that generates zero creativity in isolation. whatever good that comes out, is from collaboration between multiple parties. Name one service where a single service provider is involved; and absolutely nobody else. None right!
