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Card 1 of 15 Service, value, and who creates it ●○○ Foundational

Value is co-created

Value is co-created by the provider and the consumer together. The provider cannot deliver value on its own — it offers a service, and value appears only in the consumer's use of it, judged by the consumer.

Why it is like this

ITIL 4 moved from a delivery model to a relationship model because every measure of a provider's own output turned out to be compatible with an unhappy customer.

Not to be confused with

A softer way of saying "delivered". It has a practical consequence: if the consumer does not use the service as intended, or lacks the capability to, value does not appear — and that is the provider's problem too.

In practice

A 99.99% available platform nobody has been trained to use has produced output and no value. The availability report is true and beside the point.

Source: ITIL 4 Foundation (AXELOS / PeopleCert), 2019 edition — §2.1 — value and co-creation. Read on .

ITIL® is a registered trade mark of the PeopleCert group. ytyk.org is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by PeopleCert. These cards are independent commentary written in our own words; no part of the ITIL publications, and no ITIL diagram, is reproduced here.

Predict Check yourself

A provider hits every SLA for a year. Adoption is 12% and the business calls the service a failure. In ITIL 4 terms, what happened?

  1. Outputs were delivered but value was not co-created — the consumer's side of the relationship did not materialise.
  2. Value was created; the business is measuring the wrong thing.
  3. The SLAs were met, so the provider's obligation is discharged.
  4. This is a warranty failure, since availability was the metric.
Show the answer

Outputs were delivered but value was not co-created — the consumer's side of the relationship did not materialise.

This is the practical edge of co-creation: a green dashboard is evidence about the provider, not about value.