ISO 20000:
The Gold Standard for IS Suppliers
The ISO 20000 quality standard is increasingly important to winning bids for the supply of IT services to public sector bodies at a central or local level.
With the adoption of ISO 20000 as the international certification standard for the UK Office of Government Commerce’s ITIL framework, many experts expect all future government IT contracts to require ISO 20000 certification of their suppliers. Following the UK government’s lead, major companies are also beginning to require their IT service suppliers to be certified.
This means that failing to gain ISO 20000 certification could jeopardise the renewal of your current contracts, even if they are being successf ISO 9001/2000 is a set of criteria which define a Quality Management System (QMS).
SMS can help you ensure that your organisation is ISO 20000 compliant.
An experienced SMS consultant working with your internal service delivery and support teams can reduce the time and risk involved in achieving ISO 20000 certification.
Not only can we ensure you achieve compliance without unnecessary disruption to your day-to-day business operations, we will also help you lay the foundations for an on-going programme of improvement.
About ISO 20000
Source:
www.iso.org
The ISO/IEC 20000 series applies to both large and small service providers, and the requirements for best practice service management processes are independent of the service provider's organisational form.
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.
The variety of terms used for the same process, and between processes and functional groups (and job titles) can make the subject of service management confusing to the new manager. Understanding the terminology is a tangible and significant benefit from ISO/IEC 20000.
ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 defines the requirements for a service provider to deliver managed services. It is based on BS 15000-2, which has been superseded.
It may be used
· by businesses that are going out to tender for their services;
· to provide a consistent approach by all service providers in a supply chain;
· to benchmark IT service management;
· as the basis for an independent assessment;
· to demonstrate the ability to meet customer requirements;
· to improve services.
ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 promotes the adoption of an integrated process approach to effectively deliver managed services to meet business and customer requirements. For an organisation to function effectively it has to identify and manage numerous linked activities. Co-ordinated integration and implementation of the service management processes provides the ongoing control, greater efficiency and opportunities for continual improvement.
Organisations require increasingly advanced facilities (at minimum cost) to meet their business needs. With the increasing dependencies in support services and the diverse range of technologies available, service providers can struggle to maintain high levels of customer service. Working reactively, they spend too little time planning, training, reviewing, investigating, and working with customers. The result is a failure to adopt structured, proactive working practices. Those same service providers are being asked for improved quality, lower costs, greater flexibility, and faster response to customers.
In contrast, effective service management delivers high levels of customer service and customer satisfaction. It also recognizes that services and service management are essential to helping organisations generate revenue and be cost-effective. The ISO/IEC 20000 series enables service providers to understand how to enhance the quality of service delivered to their customers, both internal and external.
ISO/IEC 20000-2:2005 represents an industry consensus on guidance to auditors and offers assistance to service providers planning service improvements or to be audited against ISO/IEC 20000-1. ISO/IEC 20000-2:2005 is based on BS 15000-2, which has been superseded.
ISO 9001:2000
ISO 9001:2000 is the standard that provides a set of standardized requirements for a quality management system, regardless of what the user organization does, its size, or whether it is in the private, or public sector. It is the only standard in the family against which organizations can be certified – although certification is not a compulsory requirement of the standard. (Source:
www.iso.org)
The standard has streamlined the administration of the QMS (Quality Management Systems) and also reduced the amount of bureaucracy involved. It has greatly aided understanding by introducing diagrammatic process models rather than the older text based descriptions of procedures. The quality system now makes it easier to perform the measurement and analysis on a regular basis thus allowing adopters to continually improve their software quality. Finally the standard has a much more focused approach to the customer making it an integral part of the quality system.
Services that SMS provides include:
Gap Analysis
An analysis of existing processes and any quality systems to identify what needs to be added or changed to comply with the new standard
Auditing
Pre-assessment audits to confirm readiness prior to a certification body's official audit. Two types of audit can be offered:
Documentation Audit
This audit covers the final versions, ensuring that as a system the documentation is complete and fully meets the requirements of the standard. This can be done on or off-site
Compliance Audit
This is giving the staff the opportunity to be audited prior to the certification bodies' official audit. This will identify if people are correctly using the new system and give the company time to make any necessary changes. This type of audit also gives your staff an invaluable insight into the audit process, which will stand them in good stead for the official audit .
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