ITSM vs ITIL: What's the Difference?
Unsure whether you need ITSM or ITIL®? Trick question! When it comes to IT management, it isn’t one or the either. Here's the difference:
Here’s what you need to know about ITSM and ITIL, and how an intentional approach to both will contribute to the success of your IT organization.
These all-new for 2020 ITIL e-books highlight important elements of ITIL 4 best practices. Quickly understand key changes and actionable concepts, written by ITIL 4 contributors.
Before we go any further, let’s take a quick peek at ITSM and ITIL, and the differences will become apparent.
ITSM refers to the way you manage the information systems that deliver value to your customers. It is a generic term: you don’t have to choose a methodology of ITSM, though you can. Instead, if you’re running IT systems, you’re inherently performing ITSM.
As a catch-all term, ITSM encompasses all activities (including policies, processes, and procedures) that an enterprise performs in order to design, plan, deliver, operate, maintain, and control IT services. Examples of IT service management include activities like:
Originally, ITSM as a term often referred to the way we manage technology, but more recently it has become a shorthand for how to deliver valuable services to customers. (For example, a sample of customer-focused ITSM topics include:
Either way, your hardware and software and your IT services all require management—that’s ITSM.
As you may imagine, the management of IT can take many shapes and forms—some more successful than others. Of the dozens of ITSM frameworks, the world’s most common is ITIL.
Historically, ITIL was the shortened form for IT Infrastructure Library, but the acronym has outgrown the term in the three decades since it was coined. Today, ITIL is a registered trademark of AXELOS, which owns a range of best practice solutions and corresponding publications and exams. ITIL has been adopted by many organizations, and there are millions of certified ITIL practitioners worldwide.
The goals of ITIL include promoting efficiencies and organizing effectively, so that businesses aren’t hampered by their IT goals but are instead propelled forward by strong, intentional IT management. ITIL aims to stay current and its latest iteration, ITIL 4, just premiered in April 2019. Its core components include the service value system and the four dimensions model.
The service value system components of ITIL include:
To put in place the service value system, ITIL focuses on four dimensions:
(Learn more about all the ITIL phases and steps in our ITIL v3 Guide and our ITIL 4 Guide.)
It is likely that some—probably many—of the ITIL best practices would benefit your organization. Companies that adopt ITIL often report that the framework helps:
You don’t have to adopt ITIL to manage your IT services effectively and efficiently, but it will certainly help. Some organizations simply create their own set of processes for running IT, and this can work. But it’s hard to develop something original that matches the years of experience that have gone into the development of the ITIL best practice framework that has now been adopted by many thousands of organizations.
Of course, as with any work efficiency framework, not everyone loves it. Critics of ITIL cite outdated practices and stale ideas that aren’t living up to the fast pace that innovation requires today. Other criticism includes its boring approach—particularly in training and certification settings—that make it difficult to learn, let alone adopt. Luckily, industry experts widely agree that ITIL 4 is a vast improvement over ITIL v3, putting to bed some of these old concerns.
Convergence tools from BMC, Atlassian, and Asana, among others, can be useful to ITIL but also may not require a specific ITIL framework to offer some of the same efficiency benefits.
Still, the benefits likely lie in how you put ITIL to work for your organization.
As with any new practice or framework, there is always a caveat: for ITIL to be successful, your organization must decide which aspects to adopt and adapt and which factors may be less important.
The surest way to failure is to deliver a strict set of processes without building understanding on what you’re seeking or creating a culture that embraces these values. Time and time again, companies deploy ITIL practices without doing this work. You can guess what happens next: employees ignore the processes, blaming the system itself, and it’s only a matter of time before the company abandons the ITIL framework, reverting to what was “working” before. (This time with a more positive spin on their ITSM.)
Instead, any approach to ITIL should follow the advice of “adopt and adapt”:
IT organizations that make use of ITIL decide for themselves which aspects to adopt. Many IT organizations choose to adopt only the operational processes, such as incident management and change management. On their own, these do provide some value, of course, but they are only a small part of the whole ITIL framework.
However, the lifecycle approach to ITIL may deliver the best value. This covers everything from your overall IT strategy through the design, transition, and operation of services; and it incorporates continual improvement into everything you do.
When your organization has made the decision to adopt a best practice framework, a smart strategy is to understand which approach will be a good fit for your organizational culture and to incorporate it into your own management system in a sympathetic way.
When it comes to ITSM, ITIL is not the only framework that can be effective. While it is the most widely used and understood around the world, some of the most successful companies use a variety of frameworks and best practices alongside ITIL. This can be very effective as each approach brings something different to the mix.
Here are some other common ITSM frameworks:
If you run IT services, you owe it to your customers to adopt ideas that will make you effective, efficient, and agile.
