Responding to growing dependence on IT, the UK Government's
Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s developed a set of recommendations designed to standardize IT management practices across government functions, built around a
process model-based view of controlling and managing operations often credited to
W. Edwards Deming and his
plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle. • In 1989, ITIL was released. It grew to a series of 30 books that recommended and provided IT best practices that focused on and catered for client and business needs. • In 1993, the examination institute
EXIN developed the first certification scheme for ITIL. • In April 2001, the CCTA was merged into the
Office of Government Commerce (OGC), an office of the
UK Treasury. • In 2001, ITIL version 2 was released. • In May 2007, ITIL version 3 was released (also known as the ITIL Refresh Project) consisting of 26 processes and functions, now grouped into only 5 volumes, arranged around the concept of Service lifecycle structure. ITIL Version 3 is now known as ITIL 2007 Edition. • In 2009, the OGC officially announced that ITIL Version 2 certification would be withdrawn and launched a major consultation as per how to proceed. • In 2009 and 2011, researchers investigated the benefits of the ITIL implementation. • In July 2011, ITIL 2011 was released. • In 2013, ITIL was acquired by
AXELOS, a
joint venture between
Capita and the UK
Cabinet Office. • In February 2019, ITIL 4 was released. With this release, the nomenclature of using a version number was replaced simply with the numerical number (v3 became 4) in a reference to the 4th industrial revolution. The main changes were: to consider end-to-end Service Management from holistic and value-centric perspectives, to align with philosophies such as Agile, DevOps, and Lean, and to reduce the emphasis on IT Service Management in favor of general Service Management. • In June 2021,
PeopleCert completed the acquisition of Axelos. ==Guiding principles==