By continually monitoring ITIL V3 publications, I find that a lot of articles and blogs on the Internet contain questions about processes. Some are about the number of processes, others are about the (perceived) lack of processes and others are about the unclear identification of processes. The fact that processes are getting a lot of attention is not surprising to me, given the fact that ITIL V2 mainly is (known) about processes. So people are expecting processes to be continued in ITIL V3.

And I think those expectations are right: processes are an important capability to coordinate, control and deploy resources within the service management system described by ITIL V3. The big difference with ITIL V2 however is that in ITIL V3 the Services (read: output of a service provider / IT organization) have become the most important topic which are realized by service assets.

Let's take a closer look at service assets. Section 3.2 of the Service Strategy book indicates that resources and capabilities are asset types that organizations use to create value in the form of goods and services. Resources (read: people, information, applications, infrastructure and financial capital) are direct inputs for production. Management, organization, processes, knowledge and people are capabilities that represent an organization’s ability to coordinate, control, and deploy resources to produce value. It is relatively easy to acquire resources while capabilities are typically used to differentiate the service provider's services from competitive service offerings.

So processes are not the only capability for which best practices are described in ITIL V3. The best practices typically describe activities that bring togheter resources. So these best practices also relate to management, organization, knowledge and people. This implies that 1) you can choose the capabiliies that help you to meet your objectives and 2) all selected capabilities need to be integrated and aligned to make the service management system work.

Now I agree that ITIL V3 is not always clear and sometimes even inconsistent on linking best practices described with the capabilities they can be used with. This leads to questions like: "Is this best practice a process, management system or an organizational unit?". One can argue this is a bad thing. Looking beyond the clarity and inconsistency isses on the other hand this implies that you have the flexibility to determine the context (read: capability) for this best practice. I don't think it really matters much whether we call availability management a process, a system or an organizational unit. Ultimately this is all about making resources work together so that services are produced that create value for its users.

For those of you looking for a solution: personally I am often using figure 10.2 from "The official Introduction to the ITIL Service Lifecycle" book to indicate the 27 ITIL V3 processes...this should not be a surprise as I created this picture myself ;-)

Does this help?

Regards,
Jeroen Bronkhorst