Objectives and instruments of a certification according to ISO 20000

Trade-off between quality and cost

In many companies, success cannot be achieved without high quality IT services to support business processes. The necessary struggle with higher competition and cost pressures between the objectives of "IT quality" and "IT costs" is gaining more attention. Correspondingly, the well-known principles and methods of industrial production are used to achieve quality and cost objectives. Standardization in particular makes IT an essential driver of industrialization. Extensive standardization of hardware as well as system and application software has been done over the last decade. Now, the high standardization of IT service design and of operation is expected to significantly improve quality and cost.

Main instruments according to ISO 20000

The ISO 20000 standard follows the demand to transfer the standard as a principle of industrial production in the provision of IT services. In addition, similar quality management approaches to the ISO 9000 standard are followed. Through targeted and systematic use of a set of instruments, the needs, requirements and expectations of the customers should be met keeping in view the quality and cost of IT services. The main tools are:

Standardization: The unification of all practices ensures that operations during IT service provisioning are carried out independently of the people involved, time and place of production. In this way, planning, governance and control of IT services are strongly supported. This also allows for a systematic handling of technical changes as they appear frequently within IT. Standardized procedures can be presented in a transparent way and can be easily communicated. Thus they are understandable, predictable and reliable. Standardization is also a prerequisite for internal or external comparisons of quality and costs of different IT providers as well as for verification and assessment of procedures by independent third parties e. g. in conjunction with a certification.

Customer focus: Instead of focusing too much on technical conditions, IT services should be provided in a customer oriented manner. Therefore customers of IT services have to be identified and their needs for information provision and processing have to be analyzed. IT providers and their customers must clearly agree on the service offer and specify its extent and quality in the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This specification improves the transparency of service delivery as well as performance management and monitoring and also supports the operational way of charging.

Process orientation: The process oriented adjustment of IT service creation is to avoid disruptions and reduce friction. In doing so, IT transformation processes follow the prevailing pattern of process approaches to securing continuous processes even though they are part of the division of labour anchored in the organizational structure.

Continuous improvement: Following the principles of quality management, the provision of IT services is subject to constant scrutiny and assessment to identify steps to reduce clutter and illusions as well as to save resources.

Alignment to well-known approaches: The standardization of processes can be supported by referring to existing frameworks, recommendations, etc. Thus, companies can benefit from the development of science and practice using "common practice" or "best practices." Despite significant customizations, which are usually required to take into account the specifics of the company, the use of existing frameworks also supports cost targets as companies do not have to "rebuild the wheel".

ISO 20000 Certification of organization and people: An ISO 20000-1:2018 certificate issued by an independent organization serves as a quality seal to meet the requirements and requirements of a valid standard. Regular retrieval shows that compliance with the standard has been found to be consistently longer.

Source: https://20000procedures.wordpress.com

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