ISO/IEC 20000

CFN People have practical experience in applying the ISO/IEC 20000 standards to the IT Service Management processes, to obtain processes that are compliant to and supported by the ISO/IEC 20000 standard. The paramount interest is to keep it simple and efficient, but at the same time live up to the given standards.

ISO/IEC 20000 is an international standard for IT Service Management. ISO/IEC 20000 is aligned with ITIL and describes an integrated set of management processes comparable to the ITIL processes for effective delivery of services.

ISO/IEC 20000 was prepared by BSI (as BS 15000) and was adopted, under a special “fast-track procedure”, by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, in parallel with its approval by national bodies of ISO and IEC in 2005.

The focus of ISO/IEC 20000 is leadership, integrated processes, intelligent use of metrics as well as ‘doing more than documenting’. The standard currently con-sists of three parts:

ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 is the formal Specification and defines the requirements for a Service Management system (SMS) to deliver managed IT services of an acceptable quality for its customers. The specification includes:

Requirements for a management system;
Planning and implementing Service Management;
Planning and implementing new or changed services;
Service delivery process;
Relationship processes;
Resolution processes;
Control processes; and
Release processes.

Figure 5: Service Management processes covered by ISO/IEC 20000. Based on ISO/IEC 20000

ISO/IEC 20000-2:2005 is the Code of Practice which provides generic guidelines for implementing a Service Management system (SMS) in accordance with ISO/IEC 20000-1.

ISO/IEC 20000-3:2009 gives guidance on scope definition and applicability of ISO/IEC 20000-1. This part of ISO/IEC 20000 gives a list of main points on stating scope, on the applicability of ISO/IEC 20000-1 and on demonstrating conformity to ISO/IEC 20000-1. It also includes examples of scope statements, which vary according to the service provider’s circumstances.

According to the standard itself the target groups for ISO/IEC 20000 are:

businesses that are going out to tender for their services
businesses that require a consistent approach by all service providers in a supply chain
service providers that want to benchmark their IT Service Management
organizations that need to demonstrate the ability to provide services that meet customer requirements
organizations that aim to improve service through the effective applica-tion of processes to monitor and improve service quality

Approximately 450 organizations have been certified (February 2010) under the itSMF ISO/IEC 20000 certification scheme. The standard is currently under development. New editions of part 1 and part 2 are being prepared to obtain better alignment with ISO/IEC 9001 and ITIL ver-sion 3. Also completely new parts of the standard are in the pipeline:

Part 4: Process Reference Model (Purpose/Outcome)
Part 5: Exemplar implementation plan for ISO/IEC 20000-1
Part n: Incremental conformity