ITIL 5 and the DVMS -Delivering Resilient, Assured, and Accountable Digital Value Outcomes
Rick Lemieux – Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of the DVMS Institute
Introduction: The Need for Assured and Accountable Digital Value
In an era where organizations depend on digital capabilities for competitiveness, resilience, and growth, the challenge is no longer simply delivering IT services efficiently. The real challenge is ensuring that digital investments consistently create measurable value, are protected from disruption and risk, and are delivered with accountability across the enterprise.
The Digital Value Management System (DVMS) and ITIL 5 address this challenge from complementary perspectives. DVMS provides a governance-driven, value-centric overlay governance system that aligns digital initiatives with business outcomes, while ITIL 5 offers an operational and service management model focused on effective value co-creation.
Together, they form a cohesive system that enables organizations to create, protect, and deliver assured digital value in a transparent and auditable way.
DVMS: Governing Digital Value from Strategy to Outcomes
DVMS is designed to ensure that digital value is intentional, measurable, and governed throughout its lifecycle. It establishes a structured approach to defining what digital value means for an organization, linking strategy, investment decisions, risk tolerance, and performance expectations.
Unlike traditional IT governance models that emphasize control and compliance in isolation, DVMS focuses on accountability for outcomes. It ensures that every digital initiative has a clearly defined value hypothesis, success criteria, and an assigned owner. By framing digital work in terms of value streams, benefits realization, and assurance objectives, DVMS provides leadership with confidence that digital efforts are aligned with enterprise priorities and are delivering what was promised.
ITIL 5: Operationalizing Value Through Service Management
ITIL 5 builds on the evolution of IT service management by emphasizing value co-creation, flexibility, and continual improvement. It provides practical guidance for designing, transitioning, delivering, and improving digital and IT-enabled services. Through its service value system and practices, ITIL 5 ensures that digital services are reliable, efficient, and responsive to changing business needs. While ITIL 5 excels at operational execution, it does not attempt to define enterprise value or strategic-level governance structures. This is where DVMS becomes essential, as it supplies the value context and accountability framework within which ITIL 5 practices operate.
Creating Digital Value: Strategic Alignment and Design
The creation of digital value begins with intentional design. DVMS ensures that digital initiatives are rooted in business strategy, with explicit value objectives tied to revenue growth, customer experience, resilience, or regulatory compliance. ITIL 5 complements this by translating those value objectives into well-designed services and value streams. Practices such as service design, architecture management, and portfolio management operate more effectively when guided by DVMS-defined value priorities. Together, DVMS and ITIL 5 ensure that digital solutions are not just technically sound but purpose-built to deliver specific, measurable business outcomes.
Protecting Digital Value: Risk, Resilience, and Assurance
Protecting digital value is as important as creating it. DVMS provides a governance layer that integrates risk management, assurance, and performance oversight into digital decision-making. It defines acceptable risk thresholds, assurance requirements, and accountability mechanisms for digital assets and services.
ITIL 5 operationalizes this protection through practices such as information security management, service continuity management, incident management, and change enablement. When aligned with DVMS, these practices move beyond reactive controls and become proactive safeguards for enterprise value. The result is a resilient digital environment where risks are understood, managed, and transparently reported to stakeholders.
Delivering Digital Value: From Operations to Outcomes
Delivery is where digital value becomes real. ITIL 5 provides the operational discipline required to consistently deliver services that meet agreed expectations for quality, cost, and performance. Practices such as service level management, monitoring and event management, and release management ensure stability and predictability.
DVMS ensures that delivery performance is continuously evaluated against value outcomes rather than just operational metrics. This alignment shifts organizational focus from activity-based reporting to outcome-based accountability. Digital teams are no longer measured solely on uptime or throughput, but on their contribution to enterprise value realization.
Assurance and Accountability Across the Value Lifecycle
One of the most powerful aspects of combining DVMS and ITIL 5 is the creation of end-to-end assurance. DVMS establishes accountability by clearly defining ownership for value realization, risk management, and performance assurance.
ITIL 5 supplies the evidence through operational data, service metrics, and continual improvement insights. Together, they enable traceability from strategic intent to operational execution and realized outcomes. This traceability is critical for executive confidence, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder trust. It allows organizations to demonstrate not only that digital services are delivered effectively, but also that they deliver the right value in the right way.
Continual Improvement and Sustainable Value
Sustainable digital value requires continual learning and adaptation. ITIL 5 embeds continual improvement into everyday operations, encouraging organizations to refine services based on performance data and stakeholder feedback.
DVMS ensures that improvement efforts remain aligned with strategic value objectives and enterprise priorities. By integrating improvement initiatives into the broader value governance framework, organizations avoid fragmented optimization and instead drive coherent, enterprise-wide value enhancement. This synergy ensures that digital value evolves as business needs change, without losing accountability or assurance.
Conclusion: A Unified System for Assured Digital Value
DVMS and ITIL 5 are not competing frameworks; they are complementary components of a unified digital value system. DVMS provides the strategic, governance, and assurance foundation required to define, protect, and measure digital value. ITIL 5 delivers the operational capabilities needed to design, manage, and improve digital services effectively.
Together, they enable organizations to move beyond traditional IT management toward a model of assured and accountable digital value delivery. By aligning strategy, governance, operations, and continual improvement, DVMS and ITIL 5 empower organizations to confidently invest in digital capabilities that deliver lasting, measurable business outcomes.
About the Author
Rick Lemieux
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of the DVMS Institute
Rick has 40+ years of passion and experience creating solutions to give organizations a competitive edge in their service markets. In 2015, Rick was identified as one of the top five IT Entrepreneurs in the State of Rhode Island by the TECH 10 awards for developing innovative training and mentoring solutions for boards, senior executives, and operational stakeholders.
DVMS Cyber Resilience Professional Accredited Certification Training
Enabling Enterprises to Govern, Assure, and Account for Digital Value, Operational Resilience, and Regulatory Outcomes in Living Digital Systems
Why Enterprises Must Move from Paper to Practice-Based Assurance
Explainer Video – Governing By Assurance
Despite an abundance of frameworks, metrics, and dashboards, many leaders still lack a clear line of sight into how their digital value streams perform when conditions deteriorate.
Strategic intent, organizational structures, and day-to-day behaviors are evaluated separately, producing static snapshots that fail to reveal how decisions, dependencies, and human actions interact within a dynamic digital system.
The result is governance that appears comprehensive in documentation yet proves fragile under pressure, leaving leaders to reconcile disconnected controls rather than systematically strengthen operational resilience.
What’s needed is a framework-agnostic operating overlay that enables digital value, operational resilience, and regulatory outcomes to be governed, assured, and accounted for coherently across living digital systems.
DVMS Institute White Papers – The Assurance Mandate Series
Explainer Video – From Compliance Rituals to Evidence-Based Resilience
The whitepapers below present a clear progression from compliance-driven thinking to a modern system of Governance, Resilience, Assurance, and Accountability (GRAA). Together, they define an evidence-based approach to building and governing resilient digital enterprises.
The Assurance Mandate Paper explains why traditional compliance artifacts offer reassurance, not proof, and challenges boards to demand evidence that value can be created, protected, and delivered under stress.
The Assurance in Action Paper shows how DVMS turns intent into execution by translating outcomes into Minimum Viable Capabilities, aligning frameworks through the Create–Protect–Deliver model, and producing measurable assurance evidence of real performance.
The Governing by Assurance Paper extends this model to policy and regulation, positioning DVMS as a learning overlay that links governance intent, operational capability, and auditable evidence—enabling outcome-based governance and proof of resilience through measurable performance data.
The Digital Value Management System® (DVMS)
Explainer Video – What is a Digital Value Management System (DVMS)
The DVMS is an overlay system that governs, assures, and accounts for digital value, operational resilience, and regulatory outcomes in living digital ecosystems.
At its core, the DVMS is a simple but powerful integration of:
- Governance Intent – shared expectations and accountabilities
- Operational Capabilities – how the digital business performs
- Assurance Evidence – proof that outcomes are achieved and accountable
- Cultural Learning – for governance intent and operational capability fine-tuning
Underpinning this integration are the following DVMS models and approaches:
Create, Protect, and Deliver (CPD) – The CPD Model™ is a systems-based model within the DVMS that links strategy-risk and governance to execution to create, protect, and deliver digital business value as an integrated, continuously adaptive capability.
3D Knowledge (3DK) – The 3D Knowledge Model is a systems-thinking framework that maps team knowledge over time (past, present, future), cross-team collaboration, and alignment to strategic intent to ensure that organizational behavior, learning, and execution remain integrated and adaptive in delivering digital business value.
Minimum Viable Capabilities (MVC) – The Minimum Viable Capabilities (MVCs) model supports the seven essential, system-level organizational capabilities—Govern, Assure, Plan, Design, Change, Execute, and Innovate—required to reliably create, protect, and deliver digital business value in alignment with strategy-risk intent.
Question Outcome / Question Metric (QO/QM) – This approach supports governance as testable intent by defining a clear Question Outcome (QO), the specific value or resilience condition that must be true at a given boundary, and pairing it with one or more Question Metrics (QM) that provide observable, decision-relevant evidence that the system can actually create, protect, and deliver that outcome under complex, living system operating conditions
These models and approaches work together to enable three organizational capabilities:
A Governance Overlay that replaces fragmentation with unity. The DVMS provides organizations with a structured way to connect strategy with day-to-day execution. Leaders gain a consistent mechanism to direct, measure, and validate performance across every system responsible for digital value.
A Behavioral Engine that drives high-trust, high-velocity decision-making. The DVMS embeds decision models and behavioral patterns that help teams think clearly and act confidently, even in uncertain situations. It is engineered to reduce friction, prevent blame-based cultures, and strengthen organizational reliability.
A Learning System that makes culture measurable, adaptable, and scalable. Culture becomes a managed asset—not an abstract concept. The DVMS provides a repeatable way to observe behavior, collect evidence, learn from outcomes, and evolve faster than threats, disruptions, or market shifts.
DVMS Benefits – Organizational and Leadership
Explainer Video – DVMS Organization and Leadership Benefits
Instead of replacing existing operational frameworks and platforms, the DVMS elevates them, connecting and contextualizing their data into actionable intelligence that validates performance and exposes the reasons behind unmet outcomes.
By adopting a DVMS, enterprises are positioned to:
- Maintain Operational Stability Amidst Constant Digital Disruption
- Deliver Digital Value and Trust Across A Digital Ecosystem
- Satisfy Critical Regulatory and Certification Requirements
- Leverage Cyber Resilience as a Competitive Advantage
The Digital Value Management System (DVMS) provides leaders with a unified, evidence-based approach to governing and enhancing their digital enterprise, aligning with regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations.
For the CEO, the DVMS provides a clear line of sight between digital operations, business performance, and strategic outcomes—turning governance and resilience into enablers of growth and innovation rather than cost centers.
For the Board of Directors, the DVMS provides ongoing assurance that the organization’s digital assets, operations, and ecosystem are governed, protected, and resilient—supported by evidence-based reporting that directly links operational integrity to enterprise value and stakeholder trust.
For the CIO, CRO, CISO, and Auditors, an integrated, adaptive, and culture-driven governance and assurance management system that enhances digital business performance, resilience, trust, and accountability.
DVMS – Accredited Certification Training Program
Explainer Video – The DVMS Training Pathway to Cyber Resilience
The Digital Value Management System® (DVMS) training programs teach leadership, practitioners, and employees how to integrate fragmented systems into a unified, culture-driven governance and assurance system that accounts for the resilience of digital value within a living digital ecosystem.
DVMS Cyber Resilience Awareness Training
The DVMS Cyber Resilience Awareness course and its accompanying body of knowledge publication educate all employees on the fundamentals of digital business, its associated risks, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, and their role within a shared model of governance, resilience, assurance, and accountability for creating, protecting, and delivering digital value.
DVMS NISTCSF Cyber Resilience Foundation Certification Training
The DVMS NISTCSF Cyber Resilience Foundation certification training course and its accompanying body of knowledge publications provide ITSM, GRC, Cybersecurity, and Business professionals with a detailed understanding of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and its role in a shared model of governance, resilience, assurance, and accountability for creating, protecting, and delivering digital value.
DVMS Cyber Resilience Practitioner Certification Training
The DVMS Practitioner certification training course and its accompanying body of knowledge publications teach ITSM, GRC, Cybersecurity, and Business practitioners how to elevate investments in ITSM, GRC, Cybersecurity, and AI business systems by integrating them into a unified governance, resilience, assurance, and accountability system designed to proactively identify and mitigate the cyber risks that could disrupt operations, erode resilience, or diminish client trust.
A FastTrack Approach to Launching Your DVMS Program
Explainer Video – Scaling a DVMS Program
The DVMS FastTrack approach is a phased, iterative approach that helps organizations mature their DVMS over time, rather than trying to do everything simultaneously.
This approach breaks the DVMS journey into manageable phases of success. It all starts with selecting the first digital service you want to make cyber resilient. Once that service becomes resilient, it becomes the blueprint for operationalizing cyber resilience across the enterprise and its supply chain.
Company Brochures and Presentation
Explainer Videos
- DVMS Architecture Video: David Moskowitz explains the DVMS System
- DVMS Case Study Video: Dr. Joseph Baugh Shares His DVMS Story.
- DVMS Overlay Model – What is an Overlay Model
- DVMS MVC ZX Model – Powers the CPD
- DVMS CPD Model – Powers DVMS Operations
- DVMS 3D Knowledge Model – Powers the DVMS Culture
- DVMS FastTrack Model – Enables A Phased DVMS Adoption
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