Change enablement in ITIL®4

ITIL®4 defines a service change as "the addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services (ITIL®4 Change Enablement Practice Guide, PeopleCert+)."

The purpose of the change enablement practice is to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by properly assessing risks, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule (ITIL®4 Change Enablement Practice Guide, PeopleCert+). This enables a DevOps culture.

The goal is to increase velocity while maintaining the same or improved ability to mitigate risks. This requires part of the IT value stream to be automated with CI/CD capabilities. The mentality of you build it, you run it, driven by DevOps, forces IT organizations to rethink how they deploy changes. The team that builds a service or an application must also support it, instead of simply handing it to another team for deployment and support. Application development teams are now becoming fully accountable for both the operation of the service they build and the quality of code they deploy. In the cloud, this includes infrastructure as code (IaC).

ITIL®4 now considers the impact of changes to a business value stream with higher importance than previous versions. The benefits of this improved approach to change management foster both risk management and velocity, encouraging the organization to define their change management process so that they cannot have one without the other.