Sometime back words put forth by a very senior guy "ITIL V4 will be released next year. It will cover ITIL for cloud offerings" caught me off-guard. Being an ITIL expert, a senior consultant, I should have known the upcoming things or new releases for my domain. My experience said ITIL V4 is not possible as of now. ITIL V3 itself has not reached a maturity level. We are still in the process of phasing out ITIL V2. How can then we be talking about a new ITIL version altogether? Otganisations have started investing to upgrade their system to ITIL V3. How will their investments be justified? Is ITIL V3 a failure?
All these questions were troubling me. They should definitely be as the words on ITIL V4 have come from a guy much senior to me, with a consulting profile much stronger than me. What acted as a salt to my bruises further enhancing my agony was his claim of being part of OGC's ITIL V4 initiative.
I was even told that ITIL V4 is covering all aspects of Cloud Computing. This triggered another question in my mind - Why and how should ITIL best practices change for Cloud Computing?
I started my research moment I was free the things that had been keeping me busy. I got my clarity. I was correct. There was no ITIL V4. OGC was coming up with a new release or rather I should say probably a new revamped edition of ITIL V3 core volumes. The website clearly articulated that "there is no ITIL V4" and that "A new release of ITIL V3 (new edition of the publications) would be released next year".
If we revisit the ITIL V3 core volumes, one can easily make out that its quality reflected that it was a hush-hush release just like the OS releases from Microsoft. It looked as if the delivery targets were being missed so something was delivered to the customer (ITIL Community in this case). It was lacking on quality parameters in every sense, when we compare it to the two core volumes of ITIL V2. It definitely needed an update. And the OGC's initiative to revamp the core volumes should be appreciated.
