Source of Best Practice
Currently, the source of "best practice" definition for IT Service Management can be found in the ITIL Service Management Practices publications from the Office of Government Commerce [OGC (formerly known as CCTA)] and in several publications from the British Standards Institution (BSI).
The Core Service Management Practices are formed of 5 books (published in 2007) focused on a lifecycle approach to Service Management.This is a major change to previous versions of ITIL which were more processed based.The core set of books is:
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operations and
- Continual Service Improvement
This material is available as a set of books, in pdf format (single user license) or via an internet subscription for concurrent access.
BSI published the code of Practice for IT Service Management (PD0005) in 1998 and subsequently BS15000 in 2000.This standard was fast-tracked to become and International Standard ISO/IEC 20000 in 2005.
ISO/IEC 20000 is formed of 2 parts:
- Part 1:Specification
- Part 2:Code of Practice
In essence Part 1 tells you what you MUST do and Part 2 gives you some idea of how to achieve the requirements in Part 1 by giving you SHOULD statements.
In addition to the 2 parts of the standard there is also a self-assessment workbook which enables an organisation to perform a gap analysis and to benchmark itself against the standard before needing to involve any 3rd party consultants or auditing companies.
This diagram illustrates how the various publications relate to each other:
A formal certification scheme, owned and managed by itSMF, enables independent audit against the standard (see http://www.isoiec20000certification.com/). The aim of ISO/IEC 20000 is to "provide a common reference standard for any enterprise offering services to internal or external customers". Such a common language permits easy understanding of suppliers and products. More information about ITIL can be found on the OGC web-site at (www.best-management-practice.com) and about the standard at (www.bsi-global.com)
itSMF sells all of the ITIL and BSi publications (and more), offering significant discounts to members, via the
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