ISO/IEC 20000: An Introduction To The Global Standard For Service Management

Manage your IT services more effectively… This pocket guide will show you how.

Whatever your business, your capacity to supply products and services to your customers depends on your IT. Yet, all too often, companies and government departments fail to take effective control of their IT systems. Instead, organisations rely on a confused mish-mash of different technologies and ad hoc working practices.

The solution: an ITSMS. To avoid this fate, your organisation needs to adopt an IT Service Management System (ITSMS). Employing an ITSMS will enable your organisation to identify how to enhance the quality of service you deliver to your customers. The standard for an ITSMS is ISO/IEC 20000.

ISO/IEC 20000 – The standard This pocket guide offers an overview of the purpose of the standard and shows how it can be used. Topics covered include qualification programmes, certification schemes and the interrelationship of ISO20000 with other standards, such as ISO27001. The overall emphasis of the guide is on ISO20K’s customer-driven approach, ensuring your IT service management processes will be aligned with the needs of your business.

Benefits to business include:

• Deliver on the commitments you have made: When you provide services to a customer, the customer expects you to take responsibility for completing the job on time. From your perspective, the way you deal with your suppliers plays a vital role in fulfilling that objective. Implementing ISO20000 entails adopting a holistic approach to service development and delivery, enabling prompt and accurate communication between your organisation and your suppliers. By managing relationships with your suppliers, you can establish a strong supply chain that will be capable of delivering on the commitments you have made.
• More efficient and effective service delivery: Different divisions and departments are a fact of life in every organisation. The problem is how to get them working together. Without proper communication between your employees, you cannot get them to cooperate. By adopting ISO20000, employee coordination can be improved and you can protect your organisation from the risk of different business units turning into information silos. Measures, such as showing appreciation for actions that promote integration, and using key performance indicators that encourage measurement across the departmental divide, will foster team spirit and lead to more efficient and effective service delivery.
• Strengthen relationships and win new business: You can improve the running of your business simply by using ISO20000 as a checklist of activities that need to be performed. However, there are many advantages to achieving formal certification. In particular, it will help you to strengthen your relationships with existing customers and to win new business. If you are a service provider, certification to ISO20000 is an opportunity to demonstrate the quality and reliability of your service management capability to existing and potential customers.
• Win new contracts: For a service provider, certification to ISO20000 can open doors and help you bid for new orders. Sometimes, a customer organisation may make certification to ISO20000 a requirement when awarding a particular contract.

When businesses devote too little time to researching or planning how they deal with customers, the quality of service they provide will inevitably suffer, as they find themselves reacting to problems rather than devising a solution to them. In the long run, the silo-based mentality leads to a decline in the quality of service the organisation can provide, undermining relationships with customers and making it harder to forge new partnerships or win new business.

This pocket guide contains invaluable advice on how to define the appropriate scope for assessment against ISO20000 and how the service management activities are audited using test data. It will enable you to ensure your IT service management processes align with the needs of your business and ultimately grow your business by improving your bottom line.

About the Author

David Clifford is one of the world’s leading authorities on ISO/IEC 20000. He is a regular speaker at international events managed by organisations, such as EXIN and the itSMF. His knowledge, experience and contribution to the ITSM industry have been formally recognised by the award of ‘Fellow’ status by the Institute of IT Service Management. He has worked in the area of business, IT applications and IT service management supporting multi-billion dollar initiatives on a global scale. He is Head of the Consulting Practice at pro-attivo Ltd, which is a global consultancy and training company.