Difference Between ITIL V2 and ITIL V3

ITIL V2 vs ITIL V3

ITIL V2 and ITIL V3 are standards in the field of IT service management. In the field of IT service management, Information technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has acquired almost cult status today and is spoken of in the same wavelength as ISO standards. ITIL has become an international standard to talk of the services in IT service management. ITIL was published in 1980 to encourage best practices. ITIL V2 came in 2000 and ITIL V3 got published in 2007. It was being felt that with increasing complexities in the business environment, ITIL V2 was not able to serve the industry that well and so ITIL V3 was introduced with substantial changes. Let us see the most striking changes in ITIL V3 as compared to ITIL V2.

Major differences between ITIL V2 and ITIL V3

In ITIL V3, there is a decisive shift towards a service driven lifestyle and guidelines which appear to be prescriptive in nature. While ITIL V2 stopped short of ways and means to improve processes, ITIL V3 goes whole hog and clearly explains in detail things to be done to increase efficiency.

All along, industry had been requesting ITIL to add guidelines on methods to improve return on investment. It has obliged and perhaps this is the decisive difference between ITIL V2 and ITIL V3 as it has been demonstrated as to how an organization can better ROI.

Structural changes

ITIL library now contains 5 volumes which are Service strategy, Service design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement.

ITIL V3 lays emphasis on key roles and responsibilities and also stresses the role of communication in an entire lifecycle. Another difference that a user can feel is stress on process models and finding constituent parts. In the last chapter on Continual Service Improvement, it has been explained how using process improvement models and indices metrics improvements can be effected.

There are some high level evolutions from ITIL V2 to ITIL V3 which are readily felt by the user. These can be best described in the following manner.