Overview on ISO 20000 Procedures for IT Management System Certification

ISO 20000 represents an industry consensus on quality standards for IT service management processes. These service management processes deliver the best possible service to meet a customer's business needs within agreed resource levels, i.e service that is professional, cost effective and with risks which are understood and managed

ISO 20000 Procedures

The overall structure and purpose of ISO 20000 Procedures remains unchanged. However, a detailed review reveals many additional conformance requirements where ISO 20000 statements have been clarified and refined. More significant changes are outlined below. There are two notable changes to these procedures.

ISO/IEC 20000 Procedures recognizes that a customer may contract a portfolio of IT services from a provider and that these shall now be defined in a catalogue of services for that customer that includes the dependencies between services and service components'.

ISO 20000 Procedures for IT Service Management Service continuity and availability requirements re-emphasizes risk assessment of service continuity and availability as the first step in identifying and agreeing requirements with 'the customer' and other interested parties. However in assessing the conformance of a service provider that delivers a standardized service to a range of customers, the continuity and availability of that service would be risk-assessed and service level targets committed as part of the pre-contract service specification and SLA offered to those customers.

IT Service Management Procedures provides Service continuity and availability plans do not continue the former requirement to 'ensure that requirements are met as agreed in all circumstances' as that contradicted the risk-based nature of service continuity and availability management. The clause does prescribe service continuity plan and service availability plan content, with the note that these plans may be combined into one document.

Capacity management generally replicates the previous version of the standard, though again there are subtle changes. The scope of resources to be managed is explicitly listed as 'human, technical, information and financial resources'

ISO 20000 Procedures stated that 'Methods, procedures and techniques shall be identified to monitor service capacity, tune service performance and provide adequate capacity. An arguable interpretation of this statement is that the provider could identify 'methods, procedures and techniques' without actually committing to use these to 'provide adequate capacity'. ISO 20000 requires - quite unambiguously - that 'The service provider shall provide sufficient capacity to fulfill agreed capacity and performance requirements'.

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