ISO 20000

ISO/IEC 20000 is an internationally recognized standard for IT Service Management. The standard outlines how to implement IT services that are driven by and support business objectives – rather than just technology needs. By achieving the ISO 20000 certification, your organization will be able to gain benefits such as: improving corporate image and credibility, increased customer confidence, reduction in incidents and improved incident management.

What are they, really?

• Implementation of ISO 20000 encompasses the business of the company, as well as operation of the services, which implies many options. We could argue about every single process and what ISO 20000 brings, but that would lead to endless discussion. Let’s stay at the service, i.e., process level. In that case, the benefits of the ISO 20000 implementation are:
• Competitiveness and credibility – implementing ISO 20000 is your way to improve your company’s reputation (because you’ve adopted an internationally recognized standard for IT service management), competitive edge (because of your ability to compete with much bigger, well-organized competitors), perception and image (an ISO certificate, generally, improves the way partners/suppliers and customers perceive the organization), and credibility (e.g., your customers will trust you when they see that your internal organization and processes are aligned with ISO 20000).
• Compliance – by your implementation of an ISO standard, your customers know what they should expect; i.e., there are clear evaluation criteria (e.g., by implementing ISO 20000 they know what to expect from the Change Management or Incident Management process). Additionally, ISO 20000 takes care that legal or other regulations (e.g., security/ISO 27001) and their requirements are considered.
• Customer satisfaction – is there anything better in business than a satisfied customer? Well, implementing ISO 20000 makes it much easier to control IT service delivery processes and fulfillment of SLA targets (through having defined and implemented incident and problem management processes with respective roles and their responsibilities, as well as having monitoring and measurement in place). That improves the efficiency of your service management team and organization – a fact that makes your management happy.
• Productivity – let’s assume you are responsible for the whole IT service management team. Imagine a situation where everyone is clear about who does what and when, processes are defined, documented and in place, interfaces between them are clear… etc. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, ISO 20000 provides that agility. Big companies have already gained a lot of experience in IT service management, but smaller companies need an “instant” solution – they don’t have the time and resources to start from scratch. Further on, by having people and processes under control, it shouldn’t be hard to control (and optimize) your costs. Believe me, management will like that.
• Benchmark and improvement – ISO 20000 is a recognized standard for IT service management. By having it implemented, you can compare your organizational setup, processes, and services with those of other organizations (particularly with those that have also implemented the standard). And, as with all other ISO standards, continual improvement is a cornerstone of the implementation and ensures that your Service Management System (SMS), and the IT services it supports, is regularly monitored, measured, and reviewed. That opens the possibility to be better day-by-day and helps your management get a clear picture about performance and efficiency. In real life, that means that you are able to respond to the changing business requirements, which are so commonplace in today’s dynamic business environment.