The new version of the standard rethinks how the contents of ITIL are framed, defining an
IT service lifecycle that describes how service portfolios are managed, services are defined and brought into production, and how they are supported operationally. The new lifecycle talks about service strategy, development, implementation, and support activities-a little easier to understand than the ITIL V2 focus on "service support" and "service delivery." All the existing ITSM processes are present in the ITIL V3 service lifecycle.
The new service lifecycle model promotes some things to full "processes" that before were not mentioned or buried in other parts of the best practice. Since the UK Office of Government Commerce took some lessons from the ITSM marketplace as they created this model, iET ITSM already implements parts of many of these new processes, including Supplier Management and Knowledge Management.
Most significantly, two major new focus areas mesh nicely with iET Solutions' existing product set and our future roadmap plans. One of the top level ITIL V3 lifecycle governing principles is Continual Service Improvement, which is charged with "creating and maintaining value for customers through better design, introduction, and operation of services." iET Process Analyzer offers an excellent analytical foundation for the CSI process by allowing both performance metrics and process execution review in a single tool that can start with a management dashboard and drill through into an understanding of the actual process by which an incident, problem, or change was worked by the IT organization.
A new process in the Service Operation area calls out Request Fulfillment as a specific focus area-a huge improvement from the previous version, which merely stated "service requests follow a similar process to Incident Management". iET ITSM 5.0 includes a Request Fulfillment process that allows end users to request services, hardware or software through a web-based shopping cart application.
The following chart shows how the iET ITSM solutions map to the ITIL V3 lifecycle stages:
