ITIL Experience (Version 5): making digital technology feel as good as it functions
Mark Smalley, lead author, ITIL Experience
In recent years, interest in experience management has grown, reflecting the fact that dealing with technology can be tough for people.
This heightened interest is partly founded on a genuine concern for humanity and a shift from the typical IT concerns for how technology affects utility, warranty and sustainability.
However, the concept isn’t new in ITIL: the idea of design for experience appeared as far back as 10 years in ITIL Practitioner’s guiding principles and, in ITIL 4, the Drive Stakeholder Value advanced module explored the relationship between service providers and consumers with an eye on experience .
Reflecting ITIL’s evolution, ITIL (Version 5) elevates experience into a dedicated advanced module: ITIL Experience.
Embracing the experience economy
What is the business case for investing in experience? There are three elements to it:
1. Operational: if people can handle technology better, they will do their jobs better.
2. Strategic: experience is shaped already by design or accident; why not make it strategic? And treating people respectfully, as human beings, will mean they engage more.
3. Moral: it’s simply the right thing to do.
Put briefly, digital technology should feel as good as it functions.
Author and management advisor Joseph Pine coined the phrase the experience economy in a Harvard Business Review article (and later book) in the late 1990s, showing how the approach to customer experience developed by companies like Disney was equally relevant to business and technology.
While in digital technology, it’s fundamentally about how products and services enable the user/customer to get a job done, the psychology of the experience economy can enhance how those products and services are provided and, consequently, how they are consumed.
ITIL Experience, putting the human front and centre
The new guidance in ITIL Experience is treated less like engineering and more like anthropology, the study of humanity, including human behaviour.
This means that developing better experiences is not just about understanding the numbers (numerical data gathered and interrogated) but also about narrative, the stories people tell.
And it’s about shifting the gaze of technology-focused professionals to recognize, for example, the potential biases that may lead to filtering and favouring certain groups of users/customers over others, based on culture.
ITIL Experience is built on four main activities, providing well-structured and practical approaches with steps to follow:
1. Noticing: being aware of what’s happening. For example, how a lack of feedback from people tells you just as much as receiving their feedback.
2. Interpreting: when dealing with unpredictable humans, what does it mean when you notice their behaviour? How can you use AI as a “co-actor” and advisory counsel to analyze data and sentiment relating to service interactions?
3. Hypothesizing: arrive at a potential concept/approach based on assumptions and interpretations.
4. Experimenting: let’s try this and experiment where it matters.
Steps three and four address the complex adaptive systems that are human beings, aiming to increase understanding of the unconscious things that happen with people and help create empathy with them.
These steps are supported with specific artifacts. For example, a one-page experience vision brief and improvement plan on a page for teams to realize their ideas.
And the information gathered from this approach can be mapped to the ITIL continual improvement model to enable incremental changes to the user and customer experience. Otherwise, a larger, transformational change may need insight from the new ITIL Transformation module.
The endgame is that experience is integrated into how organizations create products and services.
Who is ITIL Experience for?
While experience might have been the preserve of specialists in an organization, for example, centralized in an experience management office, the need today is for experience integrated into business as usual and part of people’s way of thinking: in other words, “this is how we do things.”
Therefore, the new ITIL is relevant to anyone responsible for the strategy and creation of digital products and services: digital strategy, product and service teams, plus service design, business relationship and account management.
If we believe that digital technology should feel as good as it functions, this advanced ITIL module gives people a more practical method to improve not just what they deliver but how it lands with people, crucially, how services are perceived and trusted, which affects adoption and outcomes.
By paying attention to the relational aspects throughout the lifecycle, it ensures that products and services are designed not just for what they do, but also for how they make people feel.
Explore ITIL Experience
If you believe digital technology should feel as good as it functions, the ITIL Experience module provides a practical, human-centred approach to designing and improving digital products and services that people trust, adopt, and value.
Discover how ITIL Experience helps teams integrate experience thinking into everyday decision-making, align insights with continual improvement, and deliver outcomes that work for both the business and the people it serves.