A big thank you to all itSMF UK members who took part in the ISO/IEC 20000 Survey 2024, giving us a great snapshot of what’s happening in the service management standards community across the world. Lynda Cooper summarises the results.
208 respondents took part from 38 countries including the UK, Republic of Korea, India, Australia, Canada, Japan, and the USA. 29% of respondents represented small organisations of up to 250 staff, 15% were mid-sized, up to 1000 staff, and the remainder were from larger organisations. The roles of respondants varied as consultants/ trainers, SM managers/ practitioners, auditors and compliance managers were all represented.
52% of those who responded were from organisations certified to ISO/IEC 20000-1. The reasons for certification are shown in the chart below. The main reasons for not certifying were lack of demand from customers and regulators, lack of support for this certification from management, or lack of budget.
Is the organisation certified to ISO/IEC 20000-1, and why?
52% of respondents (93) said they were certified. 47% (87) were not certified.
Other comments about certification:
- Since we obtain certification for each service, the motivation for obtaining it varies depending on the service.
- Required for integration with our other ISO certified management systems.
Further feedback from the community
The free-format comment section at the end of the survey yielded some excellent insights. It is especially interesting to balance the negative comments with the positive ones and other suggestions.
Negative comments
- Centric to process owners, not holistic enough.
- Relic of the waterfall era.
- Moving to ISO/IEC 27001, AI etc; earlier importance of ISO/IEC 20000 slowly dying, less relevant to organisations.
- Struggled to demonstrate cost-effectiveness and value of SM and certification.
- ITIL 4 also describes a management system – the SVS – and books are more ‘modern’ with agile and connections to DevOps and Lean.
Postive comments
- ISO/IEC 20000 has been a benchmark for helping organisations to transform and strandardise services.
- The ISO/IEC 20000 framework drives value to the organisation in adhering to standards and is beneficial.
- We use ISO as a support to measure how the ITIL framework is delivering against the standard, should we ever feel brave enough to venture into ISO certification.
- ISO/IEC 20000 certification is helpful for complying with government regulatory requirements.
Other suggestions
- Strengthen promotion of the standard.
- Suggest ways to utilise ISO/IEC 20000-1 for cloud users.
- A strategic approach is needed to ensure that various benefits can be provided at the government level.
- It would be beneficial to have methods that can be efficiently aligned with regulations in each country – for example, obtaining ISO/IEC 20000 certification could be evaluated as automatically complying with certain government regulations.
The output from this survey has been discussed at the international and the UK committees and is leading to action plans for further papers to raise awareness about various topics and input into any future update of ISO/IEC 20000.
#ISO #ISOIEC20000 #ServiceManagement #Certification
Lynda Cooper
Lynda is an independent consultant and trainer, and is the project editor for ISO/IEC 20000-1. She chairs the BSI committee for service management and sits on various ISO/IEC committees representing the UK. She can be contacted via LinkedIn or at [email protected].
