ISO/IEC 20000 is the first international standard for IT Service Management. It is based on and is intended to supersede the earlier British Standard, BS 15000.

Formally: ISO 20000-1 (‘part 1′) “promotes the adoption of an integrated process approach to effectively deliver managed services to meet the business and customer requirements”. It comprises ten sections:

• Scope
• Terms & Definitions
• Planning and Implementing Service Management
• Requirements for a Management System
• Planning & Implementing New or Changed Services
• Service Delivery Processes
• Relationship Processes
• Control Processes
• Resolution Processes
• Release Process.

ISO 20000-2 (‘part 2′) is a ‘code of practice’, and describes the best practices for service management within the scope of ISO 20000-1. It comprises the same sections as ‘part 1′ but excludes the ‘Requirements for a Management system’ as no requirements are imposed by ‘part 2′.

ISO 20000, like its BS 15000 predecessor, was originally developed to reflect best practice guidance contained within the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework, although it equally supports other IT Service Management frameworks and approaches including Microsoft Operations Framework and components of ISACA’s CobIT framework. It comprises two parts: a specification for IT Service Management and a code of practice for service management. The differentiation between ISO 20000 and BS 15000 has been addressed by Jenny Dugmore.

The standard was first published in December 2005.

Taken From : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20000

In the bowl of alphabet soup that feeds our industry lurk two acronyms that actually have little to do with technology, and everything to do with how we use it: ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) and CobiT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology).

These two complementary sets of best practices deal, respectively, with service management and with governance in IT organizations. Between them, the ITIL and CobiT provide guidelines to help companies cut support costs, increase IT efficiency, and meet regulatory requirements.

The ITIL was developed by the British government in the 1980s as a best practice framework for IT service management. It is vendor-independent, and the Crown still holds copyright to ensure no organization can hijack the framework for its own purposes. It really is a library, too, originally consisting of over forty individual volumes, each one dedicated to a separate area of service management. ITIL Service Management is currently embodied in the ISO 20000 standard (previously BS 15000).

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