How to make a success of ITIL® 4 with USM (web book)

The book "How to make a success of ITIL® 4 with USM" is available as an online webbook through the USM Portal (order here), but also as an epub and as a print-on-demand hard-copy through Amazon.

ITIL has been the most important practical guideline for IT service management (ITSM) in the past three decades. Millions of practitioners around the world have applied this guidance in their day-to-day work, for a structured approach to one of the most important support areas of modern organizations: delivering IT services to improve business outcomes.

In all its versions, ITIL has adopted an approach that found a powerful basis in the description of practices: routines for performing certain tasks in practice. By conducting thorough research into successful examples of such practices, and subsequently rewriting them into examples that could serve as inspiration for others, numerous practically applicable techniques and instruments have been made available to an immense audience.

However, the application of this best practice approach in the target group of IT departments and organizations did not always deliver the expected result. Many implementation projects suffered from relapse behavior, leading to repeated deployments of the intended organizational improvements. The spectrum of practices that were laid down in ITIL was also so broad that users were forced to make a selection of the available practices for their own organization. A logical explanation for this limited return on investment can be found in the lack of principles for a methodical and systematic deployment of these practices: ITIL did not provide robust principles for the organization’s Management System that should be used to apply the practices.

Organizations that adopted ITIL were therefore forced to each develop their own management system in order to achieve the highest possible return on investment from the application of ITIL practices. That management system was and is not explicitly documented in ITIL, and other references were often not available. This eventually led to the development of USM - a method for setting up a standard management system for service providers, based on a thorough Service Management Architecture. With that management system, an organization can then manage its own selection of ITIL practices.

The generic nature of the USM method enables the deployment of this management system in any discipline for any kind of service organization, as the core building block in an integrated service management architecture: the ideal tool for an Enterprise Service Management strategy.

The combination of an easily learnable, standardized management system, and a rich collection of inspiring, well-documented best practices, therefore seems a very powerful combination: "A match made in heaven".

This publication describes the latest version of ITIL, ITIL 4, and provides instructions on how USM can be used to support the (selective) application of ITIL 4 and its practices.

Note: The reader is supposed to be sufficiently aware of the structure and operation of USM. Those who do not know enough about USM are advised to familiarize themselves with USM in more detail on the USM Portal  or to read the "USM book".