ISO 20000-1:2011 – Service management systems – Requirements

ISO 20000-1 is one of the globally accepted and a popular international standard published by ISO. First published in 2005, today it is in its second edition. The ISO 20000-1:2011 standard is aligned to the Version 3 of the popular ITIL (Information Technology Information Library) framework.

While an ITIL framework describes the good practices of IT Service Management, ISO 20000-1 standard prescribes the criteria for a service management system that a service provider may want to build (please note that ISO 20000-1 is not limited only to IT service provider). Any type of service providing organization can refer to these criteria and develop its own service management system. Once all applicable criteria are addressed, the organization can get this service management system certified from a third party certification body.

Most organizations develop a service management system because –

  • There is a need to assure their customers that the organization has the capability to deliver services that meet the customers as well as legal requirements. A certification to ISO 20000-1 will provide that confidence to the organization’s customers.
  • The organizations need to keep on improving internally so that they are able to achieve customer satisfaction. An application of ISO 9001 offers a set of 13 processes categorized into 4 service management process areas to the organization where continual improvement of services is established thereby giving the customers a consistent as well as an ever enhancing experience in terms of the service delivery.

ISO 20000-1 helps the organizations build a strong customer focus and ensures consistent top management commitment. It also brings in a process approach wherein all processes in the system are managed for building efficiencies and effectiveness.

Benefits

The benefits that an organization may get out of the application of ISO 9001 and its certification are mostly based on the management’s intentions of selecting this standard. However, following examples provide some direction about what the ISO 20000-1 can give the organizations in terms of its benefits

“It is our practice to understand the benefits that our customers want by applying ISO 20000-1 and then design the system in a way to help the organization to realize these benefits”.

An ISO 20000-1 certified service organization is considered to be more reliable than the other similar organizations that are not certified. The certification is globally accepted and is gained by large as well as small organizations hence bring an equality in terms its positioning of brand reliability per say. The certification adds up to the brand recognition.

The criteria prescribed by the ISO 20000-1 standard requires organizations to develop processes that bring consistency in service operations and support. The continual improvement efforts are mostly focused towards building efficiency in these processes. Over a period of time the organization witness improvement in the consistency within the business processes as well as the overall efficiency.

Interested parties of an organization include its customers, owners, employees, suppliers, bankers, etc. All these have certain expectations in terms of the performance of the organization. Due to the improved consistency of the organization after application of ISO 20000-1 based service management system, the organization performance becomes more and more reliable. As a result the trust level and confidence of all these interested parties get a boost.

The 13 processes prescribed by ISO 22301 brings a structured approach in terms of managing service operations and support that includes management of customer requests and service incidents. The other processes that deeply integrate intro these core processes are information security, service continuity and availability, release and deployment of service components amongst other. Overall structure helps the service provider to professionally manage service delivery and support.

Applicability

The ISO 20000-1 standard applies to all types of service organizations including commercial organizations, non-profit organizations, Governments, Educational Institutes, NGOs, etc.

Browse through the solutions for different industries based on our experience of some of the types of organizations that we have worked with in the past.

Roadmap to certification

ProcessLOGIX helps the customers from initiation of the quality management system development till certification to ISO 20000-1.

Following 12-step process describes the high level approach to implementation and certification –