In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, organizations face a delicate balancing act that many organizations must contend with when it comes to IT service management. It is a dynamic tug-of-war between innovation and stability. On one hand, businesses must sprint to adapt as they embrace rapid evolution to stay competitive or risk fading into obsolescence. On the other, they must anchor themselves in control and stability or else things quickly run amuck fairly quickly.
What is ITIL?
ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which serves as a structured framework for managing IT services, emphasizing processes, governance, and risk management. ITIL serves as the voice of reason and discipline, the steady hand that ensures that IT operations remain reliable, compliant, and tightly aligned with business goals.
The Contrasting Nature of Agile
Agile is the framework that emphasizes flexibility and agility to rapidly adapt to changes and evolving software. Agile methodology is concerned with driving the rapid creation and refinement of software products. It champions creativity and collaboration to deliver incremental value through relentless sprints. It is an approach that is a necessity when adapting generative AI or other emerging technologies.
The Great Question for Technology Driven Organizations
Here lies the challenge. How do you balance risk yet remain fast-moving at the same time. This is one of the many questions that business leaders find themselves asking.
- How do you ensure the continuous delivery of new patches and enhancements while also safeguarding your operations in terms of efficiency and compliance?
- How do you combine the governance of ITIL with the advancement of your products?
- How do you combine the compliance needs of ITIL or auditing with the relentless pursuit of innovation?
In summary, the question is: How do you incorporate these two contrasting approaches into the same environment?
The Struggle is Real
Both these frameworks are based on contrasting cultures. While Agile is fast-moving, focused on rapid innovation and adaptation, ITIL moves at a measured pace that emphasizes compliance, stability, auditability, and process control. Their differences are visible in other ways too:
- They are also typically used by different teams with distinct responsibilities. ITIL is often the domain of operations, while Agile is embraced by development teams.
- ITIL is prescriptive and operates on an SLA based approach, while Agile methodology is adaptive and works on an iterative approach.
- Each framework is measured differently. Agile teams focus on velocity indicators like development speed, feature delivery rates, and sprint completion. ITIL managers emphasize predictability metrics such as service uptime, incident resolution times, and change success rates.
Keyva’s Bridge-Building Approach
Keyva recognizes that the solution isn’t about choosing sides. It is about creating a unified model that utilizes both frameworks to create business value across the board. We help organizations recognize that IT value creation happens in the Agile space, while sustainable change management lives in the ITIL domain. By creating standardized models that translate business value across both frameworks, we enable companies to innovate rapidly without sacrificing operational excellence. This allows our clients to still move swiftly to seize opportunity, while being able to sleep at night knowing that everything is orderly and compliant.
Our solutions serve as catalysts for organizational transformation by facilitating knowledge transfer across departments and uniting previously siloed teams. Through a comprehensive suite of strategic integrations, we enable organizations to harness Agile methodologies for rapid IT value creation while simultaneously leveraging ITIL frameworks to drive cultural change and structural adaptation throughout the enterprise.
A Solution Example
Here is a great example of how Keyva is helping companies merge the contrasting styles of ITIL and Agile into a workable and collaborative approach. The change management process of ITIL is often perceived as slow and bureaucratic, especially when changes must pass through a Change Advisory Board (CAB) for approval. This causes production delays as agile teams wait around for approvals to enact their changes.
Keyva addresses this challenge by introducing automation and risk-based decision-making into the process. We work with our clients to define clear risk metrics that we then use to categorize changes based on their potential impact. Low-risk changes can be approved automatically, while only those with a high-risk profile require manual review or further testing. This approach ensures that routine or minor updates move forward quickly, while still maintaining the necessary governance and documentation for compliance and historical records. This solution essentially solves both sides of the equation. Agile teams can still sprint much of the time while ITIL personnel know that risk is being addressed properly.
A Master of Both
What makes Keyva so effective at helping their customers attain the proper balance between speed and governance is that we have skills and expertise in both frameworks. That allows us to support them at both strategic and tactical levels. Strategically, we guide organizations in aligning these frameworks to their business goals. On a tactical level, we implement a wide range of integrations and offer tools designed to follow best practices for both ITIL and Agile.
By leveraging our vast knowledge accumulated from countless integrations, we can help lead cultural and structural transformations your organization needs to thrive in this digitally transformed world. We’ll demonstrate how to streamline your processes and provide comprehensive training on both frameworks to ensure that your teams amplify each other’s strengths rather than working at cross-purposes. Let us help you transform framework friction into competitive advantage. Contact Keyva today to unite your development speed with operational excellence.