ITIL® 4 Leader: Digital and IT Strategy (DITS) – a guide for digital transformation

In the pre-IT-dependent era, business strategy focused on issues such as how to succeed in a competitive world, achieving market share, market relevance, etc, whereas IT strategy was more an inward looking, back-end or support/planning function; this was focused on alignment with business demand and capabilities.

Digital transformation and digital technologies have made IT more pervasive in business operations. Previously separate, business, digital and IT strategies must now converge, eventually making all – or most – business strategies into digital business strategies.

Certain industry sectors – such as banking, financial services, telecoms and e-commerce – have been pioneers in adopting a digital mindset; far sighted in establishing a value chain to co-create value with digital services. This has served them well during Covid-19.

These business types have had a smoother transition from a purely physical business model to include a digital business model. This has enhanced their customer experience through a seamless, omnichannel approach.

Conversely, sectors such as the public sector are somewhat behind the curve, therefore challenged and under pressure to put digital capabilities in place for sustainability in the current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment.

This is why the guidance in ITIL 4 Leader: DITS provides pragmatic and relevant best practice guidance based on in-depth, digital strategy research.

DITS is designed to take practitioners and organizations on a digital strategy journey. Its iterative, eight-step model moves from “vision” through to “actions” and is about creating sustainable, digital momentum; this fulfils the enterprise’s evolution into a digital enterprise and enables business value co-creation. The guidance also highlights four key capabilities to develop a holistic, digital capability framework: digital leadership, managing innovation and emerging technologies, risk management and structuring a digital enterprise.

Gaining benefit from DITS can be based on either your individual role or the particular scenario where your organization finds itself.

People in senior roles including CIOs, chief digital officers and other aspiring CxOs, as well as consultants and others involved in digital transformations, service delivery and strategic delivery will all gain value from DITS.

Also, if your organization is now looking to digital transformation and services as a way forward – or at any stage of digital transformation, visioning, assessment, implementation or measurement – DITS will help position IT leaders as strategic, trusted business partners in an environment where IT and leadership teams are speaking the same language.

The new guidance contained in DITS – based on expert research input from around the world – explores the use of the ITIL framework to support organizations on their digital transformation journey.

• The internal and external factors to consider while crafting digital strategy
• How IT strategy differs from digital strategy and how they can be integrated
• Create a digital strategy that achieves the most value from digital
• Implementing and sustaining digital strategy.
• Developing and nurturing digital capabilities for continual business innovation and value co-creation

For more digitally mature organizations, the guidance provides a structured and flexible approach for addressing service management challenges and uses the potential of modern technology to achieve the most value from digital.

This will help them reflect holistically and improve their existing digital strategy blueprint, which they have adopted through testing, learning and failing. And this will add coherence to future transformation, which is a never-ending process.

For organizations just starting their digital journey, DITS is a framework to help them benefit from the experience and expertise of others. This guidance will give them greater confidence when formulating digital strategy.

Senior leadership is generally tasked with crafting strategy for an organization, based on experience and expertise from having “walked the path” already.

The existence of ITIL 4 Leader DITS sends a clear message to IT leadership: this is meant for you!

Along with the ITIL 4 Strategist Direct, Plan and Improve module, DITS is mapped to the needs of strategic, organizational leadership: delivering advice for senior stakeholders engaged in strategic activities and helping them embed ITIL principles comprehensively across the enterprise.

What next?

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