When ITIL V3 was published in 2007, it was followed by a tsunami of comments on inconsistencies, errors and other critical reviews. OGC then organized a repair project that delivered the ITIL 2011 edition. As a consequence, all ITIL derived materials had to be updated.

The updated ITIL Pocket Guide now covers all of the ITIL 2011 Foundation Syllabus material, so it can be used as very low-priced reader for ITIL Foundation training and exams. The ITIL Pocket guide was sold over 80.000 times, making it one of the most used books for studying ITIL.

The 2011 update was more than just an insignificant correction. A number of news items at the ITSM PORTAL cover the key issues that were found in the 2011 update. See "ITIL 2011 replaces terms and concepts", Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Here are some of the major changes in the 2011 update, documented in the updated ITIL Pocket Guide:

• the Service Strategy book was largely rewritten
• all processes descriptions have been restructured and a lot of guidance was added
• several definitions were changed
• the strategy management for IT services processes was added
• the financial management process was rewritten, recovering the processes budgeting, accounting and charging from ITIL V2
• the business relationship management process was added, covering the management of complaints and compliments at all levels
• the Business Service Catalog and Technical Services Catalog have been replaced with customer-facing services and supporting services
• the Service Design stage (indeed, stage, not "phase" any more) now has a design coordination process
• "change proposals” precede RFCs
• all software in the DML that was under the control of Change and Release Management in V3, is now controlled by service asset and configuration management
• release and deployment management has been restructured into only four steps
• the request fulfilment process was largely rewritten
• service requests can be handled by the request fulfilment process, but also by the incident management process
• service managers are now called service owners and all managers are service managers
• the processes service measurement and service reporting were degraded to generic activities
• there now is a CSI register
• terms like "Line of Business" and "Service Level Package" were completely removed

It is highly advised you use updated information sources on ITIL 2011 for the new Foundation training and exams, since from January 1, 2012, all ITIL Foundation exams are based on the ITIL 2011 edition.