What the new ITIL® (Version 5) gets right about experience

A theme that's been building for years

Experience isn't a bandwagon ITIL has just hopped on.

The idea has surfaced in previous generations, first in the ITIL Practitioner guiding principles, then more prominently in ITIL 4's "Drive Stakeholder Value."

What's changed in Version 5 is that experience now stands as its own dedicated module rather than living inside something else. This is a direct response to growing market demand.

The broader update brings other notable shifts.

ITIL Version 5 reintroduces the lifecycle concept that some practitioners missed in version 4, treats digital products (not just services) as a dominant artifact, and positions experience as a quality characteristic alongside utility, warranty, and sustainability.

Crucially, experience is never treated as separate; it's always the experience of a product, a service, or the organization behind it.

AI runs throughout every module and is supported by a dedicated publication on AI governance.

The framework now spans product, service, strategy, transformation, and experience, each mapping to its own certification path.

🎧 If you're more of a listener than a reader,
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Trust, and continued willing engagement

At the heart of the Experience module is a simple premise: service is a value exchange built on trust, and trust depends on how people experience an organization and its products.

According to Smalley, the endgame is continued willing engagement, with the emphasis firmly on willing. Even when employees are required to use a system, the goal is for them to engage with it willingly rather than grudgingly. Digital technology should feel as good as it functions!

To make the human stakes concrete, the module follows a character named Brinley, a new joiner whose laptop arrives late and whose badge doesn't work. Nothing is catastrophic, and everything works eventually, but the fragmented support quietly erodes her engagement.

She stops asking questions, builds her own workarounds, and tells her manager she's settling in fine. No ticket is escalated; no complaint is filed. The signal is silent.

Deliberate adequacy over performative delight

In Smalley's words, the industry is obsessed with "delight." Pushed too far, delight becomes performative, and expecting someone to be thrilled that their laptop powered on is money you can't defend.

There's a better argument for deliberate adequacy: a position justifiable on both economic and ethical grounds, sitting somewhere between neglect and delight.

The honest starting question for any organization is how much its people genuinely matter to it. A question with legitimate, if sometimes uncomfortable, answers.

Three challenges, and a data point

Moving from theory to practice, there are three challenges:

1️⃣ Deciding what experience you actually want to stage,
2️⃣ Discovering how people genuinely feel (experience is idiosyncratic, dynamic, and shaped by mood, stakes, and environment)
3️⃣ Improving it through experimentation: accepting that some experiments will fail.

HappySignals' own benchmark data reinforces the point. Check out our latest benchmark report here!

Across customers, every time a ticket is transferred between people, both happiness and perceived productivity tend to drop.

Smalley shared a case where one customer found an exception: when people were kept genuinely informed about their ticket, happiness held steady even when the issue wasn't resolved quickly.

Fixing things silently, it turns out, doesn't repair the experience the way keeping people in the loop does.