ITIL Version 5 was published in February 2026, and now people ask me how that aligns with DevSecOps and CSDM5. The honest answer is: There appears to be no real alignment. At best, one can produce a matrix like the one below. As you can see, a CSDM5 domain can include multiple ITIL Version 5 lifecycles. An ITIL Version 5 Livecycle can apply to multiple CSDM5 domains. Things get even fuzzier when I try to map ServiceNow products and ServiceNow ITIL practices to either of them. From a satellite, it looks like things are similar, but the closer you get to real life, the bigger the differences and confusion appear to be.

That said, the table below can help to keep IT simple. I.e.

  • If you merge ITIL5 “Discover and Design,” you get what is called “Ideation, Strategy, Design, Planning, and Manage Portfolio” in CSDM5.
  • If you merge ITIL5 “Deliver and Support”, you get what is called “Service Consumption” in CSDM5.
  • If you merge the DevOps Portion of CSDM5 Foundation with CSDM5 Build and Integration, you have what Agile IT folks would call DEVOPS.
  • If you merge the Service Delivery portion of ITIL5 “Transition and Operate”, you have “Service Delivery” in CSDM5, which includes SECOPS

I believe there is more than IT, and that Enterprise-Wide Agentic AI platforms will emerge to address all the needs of Employees and Customers. Delivery will no longer be confined to the delivery/release of Digital products. I expect that within a couple of years, enterprises will each use one or two enterprise-AI platforms, surrounded by niche products/agents that interact with those platforms.

In today’s reality, DevOps communities typically use a couple of dozen technology-specific tools. Ideation, Strategy, and Portfolio are often still managed in O365. Service Delivery and Service Consumption are increasingly managed via Service Management tools, enabling workflows beyond IT. Increasingly, it makes sense to merge Ideation, Strategy, and Portfolio with Service Consumption and Service Delivery. And this is where I would stop philosophizing…

For companies that want to use ServiceNow, the following is recommended:

  1. For Discovery and Design, use ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Mngt, Digital Portfolio Mngt, Technology Portfolio Mngt, and Service Portfolio to define and manage the lifecycle of everything that the company provides/consumes. If there is no need for complex EA/BPM capabilities, one could also use ServiceNow EA for process/business design. Since enterprise architects prefer enterprise platforms (except for themselves), companies often use separate EA/BPM tools that they try to integrate with enterprise-wide platforms, usually the latter fails because only a few people in the world understand the language of the architects :-).
  2. For Build and Transition, for now, continue using dozens of technology-specific DevOps tools to build, store, integrate, deploy, and observe/orchestrate Digital Products. Integrate these tools with the Service Management Platform to govern risk and compliance, to track (impact of) outages, and for follow-up on observed issues. In due time, these DevOps tools will likely be replaced by AI and/or governed/controlled via AI (see below).
  3. For Transition and Operation, use IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, and Security Operations to manage Service Delivery. If you don’t (want to) use a separate GRC platform, you could choose to use the incumbent Integrated Risk Management capabilities in ServiceNow to manage/mitigate your Operational Risks.
  4. For Deliver & Support, use Enterprise Service Delivery Products (WPSD, HRSD, LSD, CSM, FSM, etc) to manage Service Consumption and Security Issues
  5. Use AI (on the Platform or alongside it) and manage/govern/orchestrate the agents that are used or provided by the Platform

Rather than interpreting and implementing variants of ITIL5 processes, it is recommended to use the process guides that come with the selected ServiceNow products. The ServicEnow platform is preconfigured to support these Out-of-the-Box processes and their roles/integrations. The process guides are upgraded alongside the platform. If you decide to discontinue a ServiceNow product, you will likely buy another platform that also comes with its own commodity practices.