ITIL Version 2 or Version 3?

Go with v3 or stick/start with v2? Here are some of the things you need to consider:

ITIL v2 contains virtually everything in ITIL v3 and vice versa. So what’s the story?

ITIL v2 is all about processes. The education is focused almost entirely on a limited core and the goal is improving IT efficiency and effectiveness.

ITIL v3 is more mature and focuses around the Service Lifecycle concept. There is a greater focus on the economic optimisation of IT. The education has been significantly extended to give a much broader view of IT concepts. ITIL v3 does make some things more explicit and thus loses it’s ‘framework’ tag to some extent though not enough to stop it being highly agile.

Remarc’s experience has lead us to believe that an IT department that needs to improve their restoration of service or tighten up changing the infrastructure reliably and without failure almost certainly needs to rely on good basic Service Management processes. They are covered equally well in V3 and V2. If you’re starting afresh or thinking of conversion – go with Version 3, no doubts. Why? The Version 2 education programme is unlikely (in the UK market) to last much beyond the end of 2008.

The full V3 education programme should be FULLY launched by the end of Q2 2008 - much is already in place. Whilst V2 education would not be a ‘waste of time’ and carries credit in the V3 scheme you would need to sit ‘bridging’ courses to fill the gap. From an implementation point of view, V2 or V3 makes little or no difference. Indeed, V3 gives you the scope to spread implementation across the entire IT department rather than just focusing on IT Operations.

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