The significance of ITIL & ISO 20000
Standardising IT Service Management
In order to ensure that the IT department of an organisation is delivering "what the business needs" - IT Service Management (ITSM) focuses upon providing a framework to structure IT-related activities and the interactions of IT technical personnel with business customers and users.
ITIL - Best practice guidelines
ITIL sits above the organisation's own policies and procedure for dealing with ITSM and should be considered the best practice for the 16 processes that it covers. Processes that it includes cover all areas that should be investigated when reviewing an IT service, for example:
- Incident Management - restore normal operating conditions following an incident
- Software Asset Management - ensure the organisation has the most efficient licensing solution
- Change Management - ensure that all changes to the system are applied using the same procedures and disruption is minimised.
ITIL is best practice and it therefore is very detailed (ITIL v1 is over 30 volumes, these have been reduced in ITIL v3 to 5 key volumes). No certification is available to say that a company is ITIL compliant or certified, therefore ISO 20000 sits above it to fill this need.
ISO 20000 - Certified Management System
As the diagram above suggests, ISO 20000 is smaller in it's scope which allows a certification body to come in and validate that an organisation is satisfying the key requirements of ITSM.