Daria Golomazova/December 22, 2025/inBlog/tags:ITSM

ITIL Maturity Model: Understanding, Assessing, and Using Maturity in ITIL 4

Learn what the ITIL Maturity Model measures, how capability and maturity differ, and how to assess and apply maturity pragmatically in ITIL 4.

Abstract circular graphic with colorful spheres orbiting a central core, symbolizing interconnected systems or maturity levels.

In many organizations, the idea of maturity in IT service management is met with hesitation. For some leaders, it recalls formal audits and uncomfortable evaluations. For practitioners, it often sounds like another abstract framework that labels problems without helping to solve them.

This reaction is understandable. For years, maturity in ITSM was implicitly associated with process completeness: documented workflows, defined roles, and formal approvals. Organizations invested heavily in “doing ITIL right,” yet many still struggled with inconsistent outcomes, reactive decision-making, and improvement initiatives that failed to scale.

The ITIL Maturity Model emerged as a response to this gap. Instead of asking whether processes exist, it asks a more fundamental question: How well does the organization manage service value as a system?

This article explains what the ITIL Maturity Model actually measures, how it works within ITIL 4, how maturity is identified and scored, and how maturity thinking can be applied pragmatically, with or without planning a formal assessment.

What is the ITIL maturity model?

The ITIL Maturity Model is an assessment framework designed to evaluate two closely related aspects of service management:

The maturity of the Service Value System (SVS) — how effectively value is governed, created, and improved.
The capability of ITIL 4 practices — whether individual practices can reliably fulfill their intended purpose.

Released in 2021, the model reflects the conceptual shift introduced by ITIL 4 itself. Earlier versions of ITIL focused primarily on lifecycle stages and individual processes, like improving incident handling, change control, or SLA performance within clearly separated phases such as design, transition, and operation. These efforts often delivered local efficiency, but offered limited visibility into how value was created across the organization as a whole.

The ITIL 4 maturity model was designed with the idea in mind that improving individual practices does not automatically lead to better outcomes. Maturity shifts attention away from isolated improvements and toward how the organization works as a whole. It helps explain why local successes often fail to produce consistent results at scale. Teams often improve only what they can see and control, but real value depends on how those improvements interact across the system.

Seen this way, maturity is closely connected to ITIL 4 Service Design. Design is not a one-time activity at the start of a lifecycle. It is an ongoing ability to deliberately shape how value flows through the organization over time. Maturity creates the foundation for this: it connects practices, governance, and value streams into something coherent, rather than a set of disconnected improvements.

You can learn more about mature service design in our article about service design in ITIL.

Capability vs. Maturity: two different lenses

One of the most common sources of confusion around the ITIL Maturity Model is the distinction between capability and maturity.

Capability answers the question: Can we do this?

It is assessed at the level of individual ITIL 4 practices. A capable practice has the necessary activities, skills, tools, and integrations to fulfill its purpose.

Maturity answers a different question: How well is this governed, sustained, and improved?

It reflects consistency, alignment, and resilience.

This distinction explains why organizations may demonstrate strong operational capability while still struggling at the system level. Practices work, but the system connecting them is fragile. Maturity addresses that gap.

Three types of ITIL maturity model assessments

The ITIL Maturity Model supports three assessment scopes. They shouldn’t be perceived as different models, or steps on a predefined journey. A more effective way to treat them is as different ways of applying the same framework, depending on what an organization is trying to understand or improve.

Capability assessment

A capability assessment focuses on one or more of the 34 ITIL 4 management practices. Each selected practice is evaluated against its Practice Success Factors and capability criteria, mapped to the four dimensions of service management.

This type of assessment is useful when an organization wants to understand how well a particular practice achieves its purpose. For example, teams may want to examine incident management, change enablement, or service desk capabilities in response to recurring operational issues.

However, capability assessments intentionally avoid broader governance and system-level questions. They show what a practice can do, not how well it is integrated into the wider service management system. As a result, they are most effective when used to inform targeted improvements — not to judge overall maturity.

Maturity assessment

A maturity assessment shifts the focus from individual practices to the Service Value System (SVS) as a whole. It evaluates governance, guiding principles, the service value chain, continual improvement, and practices—usually a small number of selected practices to provide context.

This assessment helps organizations understand how consistently and deliberately service management is governed and managed. Instead of asking whether a process exists or performs well in isolation, maturity assessments explore how decisions are made, how value streams are coordinated, and how improvement is sustained over time.

Because maturity levels are determined by the weakest SVS component, this type of assessment often highlights systemic constraints—areas where local improvements are unlikely to scale without changes in governance, coordination, or shared ways of working.

Comprehensive assessment

A comprehensive assessment combines both perspectives. It evaluates all SVS components alongside at least seven management practices, providing an integrated, end-to-end view of service management maturity.

This assessment is typically used when organizations need a holistic baseline. It can be during large transformation initiatives, external benchmarking, or strategic improvement planning. By examining practices in the context of governance and value streams, comprehensive assessments make it easier to understand not only what works, but why certain improvements succeed or stall.

Rather than offering a “higher” or “more advanced” assessment, the comprehensive scope simply provides a broader lens.

Aspect	Capability Assessment	Maturity Assessment	Comprehensive Assessment
Primary focus	One or more specific ITIL 4 management practices	Service Value System (SVS) and a small selection of practices	Service Value System combined with a broader set of practices
Core question it helps answer	Can this practice reliably fulfill its intended purpose across people, tools, partners, and value streams?	How consistently is value governed, created, and improved across the organization?	How do system-level constraints and practice-level bottlenecks interact across the organization?
Scope of assessment	Practice-level	System-level (SVS) with supporting practice context	End-to-end view of the service management system
Number of practices assessed	One or more selected practices (from the 34 ITIL 4 practices)	Typically up to six practices, alongside SVS components	At least seven practices, alongside all SVS components
SVS components assessed	Not assessed	Governance, Guiding Principles, Service Value Chain, Continual Improvement, Practices	Governance, Guiding Principles, Service Value Chain, Continual Improvement, Practices
Typical use cases	Recurring issues within a specific practice; scaling challenges; unclear results from self-assessment	Inconsistent outcomes across teams; reactive improvement efforts; unclear governance or value streams	Organization-wide transformation; service redesign initiatives; need for an integrated improvement roadmap
*What it is not* intended to do**	Assess overall organizational maturity	Provide a detailed audit of individual practices	Act as a shortcut to optimization or immediate performance gains

These assessment types exist to support different questions, not different levels of ambition. An organization may start with a capability assessment to address a specific pain point, use a maturity assessment to identify systemic barriers, or apply a comprehensive assessment when clarity across the entire service management system is required. What matters is how well the assessment scope aligns with the organization’s improvement goals.

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Capability levels and maturity levels

The ITIL Maturity Model uses two related but distinct scales: capability levels and maturity levels. They answer different questions and operate at different levels of the system.

Capability levels describe how effectively an individual practice fulfills its purpose. They range from a lack of basic capability to continual improvement, and are assessed using objective evidence—what the practice actually does and delivers, not what it intends to do or how well it is documented. A practice may be formalized and well described, yet still fail to consistently achieve its purpose.

In contrast, maturity levels describe how the Service Value System (SVS) functions as a whole. They reflect how governance works, how decisions are made, how performance is measured, and how learning and improvement happen over time. Moving up the maturity scale is less about refining execution and more about changing how the organization thinks, coordinates, and adapts.

Both scales are descriptive rather than aspirational. Their purpose is to create a shared, evidence-based understanding of current conditions, including constraints that limit system-wide improvement. When maturity levels are treated as scores to maximize, organizations often reinforce local optimization rather than address the underlying system behavior.

How assessment types and levels work together

The ITIL Maturity Model uses similar terminology to describe different concepts, which can easily cause confusion. In practice, assessment types and levels serve different purposes and operate on different dimensions.

Assessment types define the scope of what is being examined. They determine whether the focus is on individual practices, on the Service Value System as a whole, or on both at the same time. In other words, an assessment type answers the question: “Where are we looking?”

Capability and maturity levels, on the other hand, provide the language for describing what is observed. They explain how well a practice fulfills its purpose or how effectively the system is governed, coordinated, and improved over time. Levels answer a different question: “How do we describe the current state of what we see?”

These two concepts are complementary rather than hierarchical. Levels are not chosen independently. They follow naturally from the scope of the assessment. When practices are assessed, capability levels are used. When the Service Value System is assessed, maturity levels apply. A comprehensive assessment simply uses both perspectives together.

Identifying maturity across the Service Value System

Maturity is assessed across five SVS components:

Governance — how strategy and portfolios are evaluated, directed, and monitored
Guiding Principles — whether shared values influence real decisions
Service Value Chain — how value streams are identified, managed, and improved
Practices — considered collectively, not in isolation
Continual Improvement — how learning and adaptation are sustained

Each component has defined criteria, and maturity is assessed consistently across them.

How maturity is scored

Maturity scoring is often where the ITIL Maturity Model is most misunderstood.

Unlike many maturity frameworks, the ITIL Maturity Model does not calculate averages. Overall maturity is determined by the lowest level achieved within the assessment scope.

This approach may feel too demanding, but it reflects how complex systems behave in reality. System performance is constrained by its weakest element, not by its strongest.

Scoring at the practice level

For individual practices, capability is assessed through Practice Success Factors (PSFs). Each PSF is evaluated against defined capability criteria. The overall capability level of the practice is determined by the lowest level achieved across all PSFs.

For example, a practice may have strong tooling and documentation, but inconsistent integration with value streams, or unclear ownership.

In such cases, the lowest scoring dimension defines the overall capability level. This prevents organizations from masking structural weaknesses behind isolated strengths.

Scoring at the SVS level

The same principle applies to Service Value System maturity. Governance maturity, for instance, may lag behind other components even when practices perform well operationally. In that case, governance becomes the primary constraint.

Rather than producing a flattering score, maturity scoring highlights where improvement effort will have the greatest systemic impact.

Why averages are misleading

Averaging maturity levels creates a false sense of balance. It suggests that strengths can compensate for weaknesses. In practice, they rarely do.

The ITIL Maturity Model deliberately avoids this trap. Its scoring logic is designed to support decision-making, not self-congratulation.

Preparing for an ITIL maturity assessment

(Even if you’re not planning a formal one)

Maturity thinking is valuable well before any formal assessment takes place.

Preparation begins with scope. Attempting to assess everything at once often leads to shallow conclusions. Focusing on areas where outcomes are inconsistent or improvement efforts stall produces far more insight.

Next comes evidence. Reviewing documentation, records, and operational data helps distinguish perception from reality and reveals where success depends on individual effort rather than systemic support.

Equally important is shifting conversations from processes to behaviors. How decisions are made, how trade-offs are resolved, and how teams collaborate across value streams often reveals more about maturity than any metric.

Typical assessment outcomes include:

a clear view of current achievements,
prioritized improvement areas based on risk and business value,
and critical success factors such as governance clarity or leadership alignment.

Some organizations also develop benchmarks or improvement roadmaps. These are optional artifacts, not the purpose of maturity assessment itself.

Conclusion

The ITIL Maturity Model was developed to create a shared, evidence-based understanding of how service management actually functions across the organization, from individual practices to the Service Value System as a whole. By separating capability from maturity, the model makes visible a reality many teams intuitively sense: strong local execution does not automatically translate into effective system behavior.

Used correctly, the model shifts the conversation away from aspirational targets and toward structural constraints. It highlights where governance, measurement, feedback loops, or value streams limit improvement, even when individual practices appear mature in isolation. This perspective is especially important for organizations that have already optimized processes and tooling, yet still struggle with predictability, alignment, or decision-making at scale.

Ultimately, the ITIL Maturity Model is a diagnostic instrument, not a prescription. Its purpose is not to define where an organization should be, but to clarify where it is, and why. When treated as a lens rather than a ladder, the model becomes a powerful tool for guiding meaningful, system-level improvement—grounded in evidence, context, and organizational intent rather than compliance or maturity scores.