ISO 20000: The International Standard for Service Management

What is ISO/IEC 20000?

ISO/IEC 20000, often referred to simply as ISO 20000, is the international IT service management (ITSM) standard that enables IT organizations (whether in-house, outsourced, or external) to ensure that their ITSM processes are aligned both with the needs of the business and with international best practice.

ISO 20000 helps organizations benchmark how they deliver managed services, measure service levels, and assess their performance. It is broadly aligned with, and draws strongly on, ITIL^®.

Purchase your copy of the standard today >>

Benefits of ISO 20000

ISO 20000 can help your organization benchmark its ITSM, improve its services, demonstrate an ability to meet customer requirements, and create a framework for independent assessment.

Some of the most common benefits of ISO 20000 certification for service providers are that it:

• Offers competitive differentiation by demonstrating reliability and high quality of service
• Gives access to key markets, as many organizations in the public sector mandate that their IT service providers demonstrate compliance with ISO 20000
• Provides assurance to clients that their service requirements will be fulfilled
• Enforces a measurable level of effectiveness and a culture of continual improvement by enabling service providers to monitor, measure and review their service management processes and services
• Drives down the costs of conformance to a multitude of regulations, including the PCI DSS and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
• Helps leverage ITIL practices to optimize resources and processes.

Learn more about the ISO 20000 implementation process >>

ITIL and ISO 20000

There is an important and close relationship between ISO 20000 and ITIL^®, the methodology for managing IT as a service. ITIL provides advice on best practices in IT service management, including options that may be adopted and adapted by organizations according to business need, local circumstances and the maturity of the service provider. ISO 20000 sets the standards that service management processes should aim for.

You can read all about ITIL and its relationship with ISO 20000 in the popular title, Pragmatic Application of Service Management. Written by service management experts, this book will teach you how to integrate COBIT® 5, ITIL®, ISO 20000 and CMMI-SVC, combining the best from each approach.

ISO 20000 documentation

As part of implementing an ISO 20000-compliant SMS, you will be required to produce documentation aligned with the Standard. Although there is no particular approach for how to structure your documentation, you will need to produce documents and records for all processes in the scope of ISO 20000, and the number you produce will vary depending on your company size.

You can use the ITSM, ITIL® & ISO/IEC 20000 Implementation Toolkit to meet these documentation requirements. Developed by industry experts, the templates, policies and procedures in this toolkit will accelerate your project, helping you implement and execute your own SMS with minimal stress.