Since its release in 2019, ITIL 4 has exerted a profound impact on IT Service Management. Among its key components, the guiding principles embody the core ideas of ITIL and service management, while supporting successful practices and effective decision-making across all types and levels of organizations. This part will interpret and analyze these guiding principles.
01 What Are the Guiding Principles?
Guiding principles provide top-level direction for organizations implementing IT Service Management (ITSM) and can be flexibly adapted to the specific contexts and needs of different organizations. For example, if an organization’s principle is “high integrity,” it means that every member of the organization should demonstrate high integrity in daily tasks, decision-making, and interactions across all levels. These principles are binding for all individuals and positions within the organization, and remain unchanged regardless of circumstances.
ITIL 4 defines seven guiding principles, which include:
1 Focus on Value
2 Start Where You Are
3 Progress Iteratively with Feedback
4 Collaborate and Promote Visibility
5 Think and Work Holistically
6 Keep It Simple and Practical
7 Optimize and Automate
The seven principles of ITIL 4 also successfully incorporate principles advocated by various best practices and standards such as COBIT, Agile, DevOps and Lean. This inclusive design enables organizations to easily align their IT service management with these diverse best practices and standards.
02 Breaking Down the Seven Guiding Principles
The specific content and practical significance of these seven guiding principles are as follows:
1 Focus on Value
The value of a service is always defined from the customer’s perspective. Every service or product should create value for customers and their stakeholders. Services must not only create value, but also be recognized and acknowledged by stakeholders upon realization.
Every service yields unique outcomes, and the value of these outcomes can be quantified by evaluating the service’s effectiveness. However, in pursuit of value maximization, we must not overlook the service recipients—the users and beneficiaries. Therefore, as service providers (e.g., IT departments), one of the primary tasks is to clearly identify the main users and stakeholders, such as customers and users. This not only helps service providers better understand the target audience, but also ensures that service delivery, changes, and improvements are precisely tailored to meet the needs of these audiences, thereby maximizing value.
Case: A Bank's Monitoring System
The IT O&M department provides monitoring services to the business departments of a bank, overseeing the bank’s IT infrastructure. The bank delivers financial services to help its customers achieve their objectives. Financial services are diverse and delivered through various channels such as counters, ATMs, online banking, and mobile banking.
All of the bank’s business services rely on corresponding application systems and underlying infrastructure. Any failures in infrastructure components can lead to disruptions in banking services, affecting the bank’s customers. For instance, a server failure in the mobile banking system will directly prevent users from accessing mobile banking.
If the bank’s business departments cannot derive value from IT services, they may deem such services meaningless. Therefore, IT service providers must visualize the value to ensure that the services they provide meet the needs of the business departments and deliver tangible value to the end customers.
The following key questions can help clarify the value of services to beneficiaries:
● Which customers/users are using these services?
● What goals do these services help them achieve?
● How do these services help them achieve these goals?
● What cost or financial implications need to be considered from the users' perspective?
● What potential risks might the services pose to users?
Based on the above examples and questions, the following conclusions can be drawn:
● The core beneficiaries of this service are the bank’s business departments, while the ultimate beneficiaries are the bank’s end customers.
● This service helps business departments gain insight into the status and performance of IT infrastructure.
● By gaining detailed insights into the state of IT infrastructure, the bank can optimize and improve the performance of components, thereby enhancing the availability and reliability of IT services.
● It helps the bank provide a better service experience and retain customers.
● The risks associated with this service are generally controllable. Even if the monitoring service itself malfunctions, the bank's core business can still operate normally. However, if the bank’s monitoring services fail to detect and report IT infrastructure issues promptly, risks may accumulate and cause performance degradation in infrastructure components such as servers and network devices. This, in turn, can undermine the overall quality and speed of the bank’s services.
In conclusion, IT service providers must make value creation for users and stakeholders their core guiding principle and optimize service design and delivery accordingly. Only then will the service have practical significance for its recipients; otherwise, it loses its fundamental reason for existence.
2 Start Where You Are
When building a new system or improving an existing system, organizations should fully leverage their current environment, practices, and technologies rather than completely discarding existing systems or pursuing idealized outcomes. This approach helps avoid wasting time, effort, and resources, while preserving the value of existing systems, services, practices, personnel, processes, tools, and technology platforms.
First of all, it is necessary to measure and evaluate existing systems to gain a deep understanding of the current state, and then evaluate the potential for reusing them where applicable and feasible. This method enables reasonable decision-making based on the actual status of the systems. Decisions in this process should be grounded in an accurate grasp of the system's current state, not idealistic expectations. It is crucial to recognize that any decisions to improve or optimize existing systems must be rooted in the actual current situation to ensure the effectiveness of the decisions and the feasibility of implementation.
During the evaluation process, it is also essential to exclude biased data and incorrect assumptions that could lead to erroneous conclusions and decisions. The individuals conducting evaluations and making recommendations need a clear understanding of the existing situation, the planned state of the new system or service, and the intended goals, and they should maintain an unbiased stance throughout the evaluation.
Appropriate and meaningful metrics must be used for measurement during evaluation. Metrics can analyze services and provide directional guidance, assisting decision-makers in making informed and accurate choices.
3 Progress Iteratively with Feedback
Market conditions change continuously, and enterprises must adjust their direction quickly in response to new developments and demands. This puts pressure on both the speed and direction of service iteration. Continuous feedback loops and smaller iterations enable services to be optimized and adjusted rapidly. Feedback should be collected throughout the lifecycle and used to make the necessary adjustments.
Structured feedback throughout the lifecycle of a service or product helps organizations understand users' perceptions of value and preferences, activities across the entire value chain, governance and control mechanisms, as well as the management of partners and suppliers, as well as the demands for services and products.
At the same time, it enhances service flexibility, enables faster responses to changes in user or customer needs, quickly detects failures, and boosts overall service quality.
Figure 2: Continuous Feedback in Each Iteration of the Value Stream
When applying the principle of "progress iteratively with feedback," it is important not to let specific details hinder progress. Focus on the overall situation, visualize the value stream, and establish the necessary iterative and feedback mechanisms to accelerate the overall iteration process.
Case: Building an Application System for the Finance Department
An IT service organization decides to build an application system for the finance department. Although the IT department understands the department’s needs, such as accounting, billing, and payment processing, these modules must also be integrated with functions such as notifications and reporting. When designing the architecture, it is crucial to visualize the requirements and describe the overall scope of the application system. However, a perfect design is rarely possible. The design and development process may become cumbersome, and some functional requirements may be overlooked, resulting in an incomplete product.
When outlining the overall architecture of the application system, the sequence of modules to be developed should be defined. Additionally, it is necessary to conduct in-depth discussions on each module with key stakeholders from the finance department, so as to improve the comprehensiveness and integrity of the application design.
Furthermore, during application development, continuous feedback helps to monitor the progress and performance of the modules being developed. A lack of feedback may lead to difficulties in correcting undetected issues later in the project.
The purpose of this principle is to prevent defects from propagating downstream through the value stream.
4 Collaborate and Promote Visibility
Silo culture is prevalent in most organizations. This approach does not foster a culture of collaboration, does not encourage collaborative empowerment, and fails to adjust established processes, practices, and communication methods to facilitate collaboration.
Collaboration is the way to foster the trust required to drive improvements, and tangible outcomes and actions. It further ensures enhanced information flow and increased system awareness.
Current organizations increasingly emphasize introducing innovative solutions through a collaborative culture. Understanding different perspectives and valuable insights helps build a better working environment and more reasonable strategies and practices.
Compared with working in a siloed culture, collaborative work is more highly valued. Achieving goals relies not on individual effort alone, but on the participation and cooperation of multiple people. A collaborative culture enables organizations to demonstrate their capabilities and is crucial to improving service quality, service value, and the customer experience.
Figure 3: Silo Culture vs. Collaborative Culture
Continuous engagement and interaction with stakeholders throughout the service lifecycle and management processes produce better collaboration outcomes. Customers are the most prominent stakeholders, and service providers must ensure that delivered outcomes help customers achieve their goals. This requires interaction and collaboration among all stakeholder groups, including service teams (e.g., IT service teams), partners, and suppliers. In addition, a thorough understanding of work in progress (WIP), constraints or bottlenecks, undiscovered or underused capabilities, and sources of waste across the value chain can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall value stream.
Case: Developing a Standard Operating System Image for Server
To reduce communication difficulties and improve business convenience, an IT O&M team decides to establish a standardized server operating system image for the entire company. During this process, the team must collaborate with all stakeholders in the organization, such as business and R&D users and department heads, to understand each department’s detailed requirements. These include the application systems in use, system configuration requirements, and the knowledge users need to operate the new system.
To make this initiative more effective, the IT O&M team can conduct presentations, send email notifications, and provide user training. These activities increase awareness of the initiative, help users understand the plan and its objectives, and support a smooth transition and stronger collaboration.
In the process of driving a collaborative culture, it is critical to address user resistance. This attitude is quite common during change processes and may stem from diverse underlying reasons. Therefore, it is necessary to deeply analyze the root causes of this resistance and develop specific, effective measures accordingly to ensure the smooth transformation toward a collaborative culture.
5 Think and Work Holistically
Many organizations lack a clear understanding of how the various components of their service ecosystem are organized and work together. To achieve a comprehensive and clear grasp of this, organizations need to meticulously map out and understand the entire system from start to finish. When organizing and establishing such a system, having a "big picture" or holistic view can help organizations better describe and understand the overall state of their services and service management system.
Elements such as services, processes, practices, roles, partners, and suppliers do not exist in isolation but are closely interconnected. The outcomes delivered by the organization to internal, external, and other stakeholders are collectively influenced by these factors. Efficiency and effectiveness are optimized only when the organization operates these activities in an integrated manner, treating them as a unified whole rather than independent parts. How to efficiently connect and integrate these elements is one of the key questions that a holistic "big picture" aims to address. From this perspective, we can more clearly see the relationships and interactions among these elements, thereby enabling more informed decision-making.
Case: Bank Service
Figure 4: Overall View of Various Channels for Bank Customers to Access Banking Services
The example above (Figure 4) illustrates the various channels through which bank customers access banking services. Describing the system in this way makes it easier to depict and understand the entire banking ecosystem, and also aids in comprehending the interfaces and integrations across all systems.
This is a one-dimensional view that provides the first layer of the overall picture. All components—including solution architecture, service architecture, technical architecture, process models, methodology frameworks, supporting systems and tools, measurement methods, and metrics—need to be considered and elaborated in detail.
Throughout this process, it is essential to recognize the complexity and diversity at each level of the system. Through comprehensive understanding and analysis, combined with the use of various techniques and methods, it becomes clear that systems, rules or policies, processes, and practices built for one type of scenario may not fully fit other types of scenarios.
6 Keep It Simple and Practical
This principle emphasizes designing the minimal steps necessary to achieve an objective within any method or process. When delivering a solution, it is crucial to develop an approach that is feasible, practical, and easy to understand, and the solution should provide value to the customer based on what they aim to achieve.
This principle applies to every process, practice, method, and solution defined for services. It requires organizations to define the minimum or optimal steps needed to deliver outcomes, keeping them simple and effective.
When defining a service, attempting to cover all exceptional scenarios can lead to unnecessary complexity. There is nothing wrong with evaluating and analyzing service-related anomalies, but accounting for every potential issue—even those that rarely need to be addressed—will overcomplicate the solution. Therefore, organizations should only define or optimize services based on their importance and essential needs.
Case: Online Banking Service
In online banking, collecting certain data—such as simply recording the total time a customer spends completing a transfer—does little to optimize the customer experience. The real value lies in focusing on the time required for system-triggered processes.
Examples include login process duration, the time taken to display account balance information after submission, and the number of steps involved in transferring. For instance, if a login process originally has four steps, adding too many identity verification steps (more than two) will complicate the process.
Figure 6
When applying this principle, keep value front and center. Simplify each step while ensuring that it operates effectively, draw on the practical experience of relevant personnel to encourage user adoption, and eliminate all non-value-adding steps or processes.
7 Optimize and Automate
Optimization refers to making something more effective and enhancing its utility. Optimization activities involve improvements to entire services, systems, processes, products, etc., enabling better utilization of resources to maximize value.
The goal of optimizing a service organization is to improve service performance and deliver service value. Optimization investment should align with the overall objectives of service management and the organization and should be taken only to a meaningful level. Over-optimization can waste resources or create diminishing value. Therefore, time, resources, and compliance requirements must be considered during optimization.
Figure 7：From Manual to Automation
Once optimization is achieved, examining the potential for automation and selecting appropriate technological products is crucial for improving efficiency and effectiveness. In a nutshell, automation can be defined as standardizing and simplifying manual tasks
Case: Integration of Monitoring Tools and ITSM Tools
By integrating monitoring tools with ITSM tools, alerts can automatically trigger incident processes and associate relevant applications or devices. As the proportion of manual intervention decreases, the efficiency of processes and services can be significantly improved. This also requires evaluating each step of the process individually.
Identifying automation within each service is essential. Before considering automation, define its objectives, such as cost savings, human error minimization, user experience improvement, and efficiency and effectiveness enhancement.
Priority should be given to simplifying scenarios that are simple and highly repetitive. For example, automating regular backups (daily/weekly/monthly) is more meaningful than automating employee onboarding (assuming it occurs only once a month).
When applying optimization and automation, it is also important to consider and integrate other guiding principles, such as “Focus on Value” and “Start Where You Are.”
03 Interdependencies
When following the seven guiding principles of ITIL 4, it is important to realize that they are interconnected and interdependent, rather than existing in isolation. For instance, if an organization is applying the principle of "Progress Iteratively with Feedback," it should also integrate the principle of "Think and Work Holistically." This ensures that each iteration encompasses improvements across all components required to deliver outcomes. All other principles are similarly applicable. For example, "Focus on Value" helps in understanding the true value for customers, while "Collaborate and Promote Visibility" can make it easier to keep processes simple and practical.
Figure 8：Interdependencies and Interactions of ITIL®4 Guiding Principles
Although not every principle applies equally to every scenario, service management organizations must still consider which principles are relevant and how they should be combined in each situation. The seven principles apply throughout the service lifecycle and the service value chain. They are universal, authoritative, and self-validating and should not be arbitrarily modified or ignored when delivering value to customers through services.
