ITIL V1 - The Beginning
The first version of ITIL discussed processes involved in service support such as help desk management, change management, and software distribution and control. It also covered topics such as capacity management, contingency planning, availability management, and cost management – all of which are still very relevant today.
Large companies and government agencies around the world began adopting the framework in the early 1990s to help improve their IT services and delivery capabilities. As ITIL grew in popularity, IT itself changed and evolved, and so did ITIL. In the year 2000, The CCTA merged into the OGC, Office for Government Commerce and in the same year, the first ‘child standard’ emerged as Microsoft used ITIL as the basis to develop their proprietary Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).
ITIL V2 - The first major revision
The second version of ITIL was published in 2001. This version was focused on the elimination of duplicate entries, improvement in the consistency of topics and inclusion of new IT concepts. Some of the topics covered in ITIL v2 were problem management, release management, incident management, financial management of IT assets, security management, and service continuity management. These are some of the most enduring and popular pieces of ITIL today. ITIL v2 also introduced the concepts of call centers and help desk - discussing and comparing three kinds of service desk structures: local service desks, central service desks, and the virtual service desks. In the following years, ITIL became the most widely accepted IT service management adopted by organizations.
ITIL V3 - Introduction of the Service Lifecycle
In 2007 ITIL version 3 was published. This adopted more of a lifecycle approach to service management, with greater emphasis on IT business integration. This version is another upgrade and it consists of 26 processes and functions, grouped into 5 volumes, which focus on service strategy, service transition, service design, service operation, and continual service improvement. ITIL V3 approximately doubled the scope, almost tripled the number of processes and functions and introduced a few new dimensions and perspectives. In the service transition and service strategy volumes, new concepts were added in the areas of service assets, business case development, service value definition, and information security management. In the service operation and service design volumes, new topics introduced include access management, request fulfillment, and application management. The ITIL v3 volume on continual service improvement introduced concepts related to planning and scheduling.
The ITIL v3 2011 edition was an update to the 2007 edition primarily aimed at resolving the errors and inconsistencies in the text and diagrams across the suite. The majority of content changes in the 2011 update were in the Service Strategy volume—the rest of the volumes received primarily minor contextual edits.
