ISO/IEC 20000: The First International Standard of IT Service Management
Question:
Discuss about the Conflicting Discourses and Incompatible Practices.
ISO/IEC 20000 is a standard service management system (SMS). It is regarded as the first international standard of IT service management. This standard is developed by BSI Group. A system consists of a set of process.Each process delivers a result and that result can become the input of another process.In this way the processes interconnects each other and develop a system(Cots and Casadesús, 2014). Service Management Standard helps to provide a better connectivity between the processes in the system, which eventually helps to build a better system with increased productivity (Moreno-Campos et al. 2014).ISO/IEC 20000 provides the requirements regarding implementation, review of the services and the systems, which helps IT service providers to improve their quality of service provided to the external customers. ExcelIT, an Australian company, wants to implement ISO/IEC 20000 in their company in order to improve the productivity along with the service they provide to the customer. There are certain issues and facts those are needed to be concerned about, during the implementation of the ISO/IEC 20000 in the company. Major advantages and the challenges during the implementation process are needed to be evaluated before the final implementation of this standard. In the video the benefits of implementing this standard for an external IT service provider company has been discussed. The content of the video is divided into four parts- the context of the discussion, a case study about the implementation of ISO/IEC 20000 in a company from the recent past, benefits achieved after the implementation and at the end all the points discussed are summarized.
Service management system is a set of guidelines that helps the processes to deliver their result in a proper way and thus helps to develop a proper system(Marrone et al. 2014) . The service management system is a standard term, generally used for the IT services, but it can be applicable for any industry along with the IT industry.
There is a difference between a system and a process. The results from the processes interconnect with each other in a proper way which results developing a system.In order to run any organization successfully, need of several well defied working systems are needed. Service system management helps to benchmark these systems by providing the proper guideline.
IT Management Services (ITSM) is a general framework that helps to improve the strategic plans of maintaining and delivering the IT services. There are various frameworks those are made for implementing the ITSM in the organization. ISO/IEC 20000 is one of them.
The difference of the ISO/IEC 20000 standard from the other standards has made it more effective for implementation of service management. There are two areas to focus on while delivering the service to the customers by any service provider (Renault, Cortina & Barafort 2015). One focus area is delivery of value, which concerns about the list of deliverables are provided in a proper way with the warranty of the work to the customers. Another focus area is end to end control , which has become a major concern for most service providing companies like ExcelIT. ExcelIT is concerned about the two aspects of the customer demand-one is service –level agreement (SLA) another is the perception of the customer about the service. The service provider has to deal with these two areas while delivering he service.The judgment of the service by the customers depends on efficiency of a company to delivering the service with maintaining these two factors (Steinberg 2013). The commitment of providing service by the service provider is again dependent on the internal and the external teams. In order to deliver the service properly, the service provider has to make a strong control over both internal and external team. ISO/IEC 20000 plays an important role in this area. In the last modification of this standard, the inclusion of clause 4.2, this talks about the control of governance of processes operated by the third parties. Though it does not indicate to control over the management process of the external team but implementing ISO/IEC 20000 in ExcelIt will ensure the value driven service management. The main focus of ExcelIT should not only be on getting the ISO/IEC 20000 certificate but develop a good service management practice in the organization. The implementation of this good practice is getting certified by ISO/IEC 20000.
Benefits and Challenges of ISO/IEC 20000 Implementation
The client, where the speaker went a s a external consultant, was a IT service provider, based in India. This company has its presence globally and had 4000 plus employees at that time. The service, the company provide are IT infra and ADM (Application, Development and Maintenance). The main objectives of the client company are-
- That IT Company has many clients from various parts of the world.Some of those clients are practicing ISO/IEC 20000 and for that reason the company wants to establish central management system.
- Enhancement of the confidence of the customer.
- Betterment of the delivery teams, which means the improvement of the connection between IT service provider team and the support team of managers.
- Getting Indian offices ISO/IEC 20000 certified.
The kind of approach taken for the implementation was iterative approach. The iterative approach has been followed as , the journey of getting ISO/IEC 20000 certified is a long process and the employees may loose motivation in the course of the process (Wan & Jones 2013). The team from the external consulting farm is of three members. The first phase of the process is planning of the road and next comes the gap analysis of the existing service management system, which were consisted the taste of effectiveness and taste of design.The report of the gap analysis indicates the company was lacking from requirements for meeting the ISO/IEC 20000 benchmark. Designing phase comes after the gap analysis. Four things were redesigned in this part-
- People
- Process
- Product
- Partner
The iterative part starts from this designing part which consists of various process from team specification to monitoring and reporting. All these phases were done according to the modification checklists. The distribution of the certain roles was done considering the capability of the respective person in the organization (Iden & Eikebrokk 2013). Apart from that some factors such as the interest of a person to take the role or conflict of between the two roles taken by the same person are also considered. The role based training I given to the person after the distribution of the role so that they can play their efficiently. Then those people are asked to plan the work of their respective department and those plans were presented in font of stakeholders for the approval and sign off (Melendez, Dávila & Pessoa 2016). Next set of iteration is the internal auditwhich includes the summarized version of the previously mentioned steps, and closing the identified gaps.External certification journey happened after the internal audit, where external bodies judges the capability of the organization for getting approval of the certification. That organization got the certification successfully and after that closing of the project is done.
- Lack of management commitment.
- Structural change in the organization.
- Tackling the focus of the managements.
- Understanding of the whole certification process for the people from the management people in the organization.
The speaker has discussed certain steps taken by his team in order to deal with the above mentioned challenges; those were occurred during the process of the certification(Disterer, 2013). In order to deal with the structural change in the organization the roles for the different work were well defined, so that the person holding the position may get transferred but the role of that position did not change for the new person holding that position( Ionita& Gordas 2013). In order to hold the focus of the management on the certification process, the iterative model is used so that the progress can be shown to all the employees in the organization.
In order to adopt the certification process in the ExcleIT there can be two ways of implementation. One is waterfall model and another is iterative model. Adopting the waterfall model will take much less time in the certification process and can be handled easily while it will show the progress of the process only at the end of the process (Mesquida & Mas, 2015). Employees may lose motivation in the middle of the certification process if they cannot see the progress accordingly. Moreover the management of the organization may want to see the result in a timely basis. In order to handle this problem it is recommended that the iterative model should be used in order to implement the ISO/IEC 20000 certification process.
Implementing ISO/IEC 20000 at ExcelIT: An Overview
Benefits can be of two types- efficiency benefits which helps to reduce the wastage of resources to achieve the efficiency of the service another is effectiveness benefits which deals with the better achievement of the goal. ISO/IEC 20000 is effectiveness benefit. Three major benefits that can occur in an organization after the implementation –
- Better coordination between the support team and the service delivery:The identification of the dependencies and the better understanding of the OLA and reviewing the OLA can lead to the betterment of the coordination between the service delivery and the support team.
- Acknowledgement of the higher support team: The employees form the higher management and the support system may feel that they are not so much involved in business of delivering the services (Huang, Wu & Chen 2013). Implementation of this certification standard will ensure that the workers form the support team also feel involved in the whole process and their contribution in delivering the service to the clients.
- Service ownership: The culture of the service ownership will be improved. That is, the service provider can cover all the requirements of the clients including SLA and the perception based demands which are not included in the SLA (Trusson, Doherty & Hislop 2014). This will help to improve the review of the service by the consumers.
ExcelIT is the growing IT Company in Australia .Currently; it wants to benchmark its service management. The company wants effectiveness benefits to achieve the improvisation of the organizational structure. In order to do this ExcelIT wants to adopt the latest international guideline for the improvement of the servicemanagement that is ISO/IEC 20000 (Jäntti et al. 2013). Taking this kind of decision is relevant for the organization and it will be beneficial for the company in a long run. This certification will help to improve the quality of providing the IT solution to the consumers (Hoy & Foley 2015). Apart from that this certification will help the company to identify the certain tools that can be used to improve the quality of service. The company can take care of the SLA and can full the expectation from the perception of the consumer. Moreover this certification process will help to drive the organization to deliver a value based service.
In order to achieve ISO/IEC 20000, ExcelIT has to go through some processes or steps. First, the organization needs to check its current service management system. According to that the necessary changes are needed to be done to make an approach for implementation of ISO/IEC 20000. The company can take expert advice from external consulting farms in order to carry out the analysis of the existing service management system in the organization and the required good practices for achieving the ISO/IEC 20000 certificates. The selection of the external consulting farm can be decided on the basis discussion among the company officials.
Conclusion
It can be concluded from the above discussion that ISO/IEC 20000 has certain importance as it is slightly different from the other standardization. The solution and concern about solving all the problems those come under the focus of end to end service providing can be solved with this certification. Moreover it can help to modify and improvise the organizational structure by improving the better coordination between the service providing team and the management. It also helps to improve the good will of the company, as it improves the confidence of the customer by improving the quality of the delivery of the service. Thus, it can be said that the overall impact of this certification is very positive on the adopting organization or the company.
References
Cots, S, & Casadesús, M 2015, ‘Exploring the service management standard ISO 20000’, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol. 26, no. 5-6, pp.515-533.
Disterer, G 2013, ‘ISO/IEC 27000, 27001 and 27002 for information security management’, Journal of Information Security, vol.4 no. 2, pp.92.
Mesquida, AL, & Mas, A 2015, ‘Integrating IT service management requirements into the organizational management system’, Computer standards & interfaces, vol.-37, pp.80-91.
Renault, A, Cortina, S & Barafort, B 2015, June, Towards a maturity model for ISO/IEC 20000-1 based on the TIPA for ITIL process capability assessment model, In International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination (pp, 188-200), Springer, Cham.
Hoy, Z & Foley, A 2015, ‘A structured approach to integrating audits to create organisational efficiencies: ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 audits’, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol.-26, no.-5, pp.690-702.
Huang, SJ, Wu, MS & Chen, LW 2013, ‘Critical success factors in aligning IT and business objectives: A Delphi study’, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol.-24, no.-9, pp.1219-1240.
Moreno-Campos, E, Sanchez-Gordón, ML, Colomo-Palacios, R & de Amescua Seco, A 2014, June, Towards measuring the impact of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard: a systematic review, In European Conference on Software Process Improvement, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Ionita, I & Gordas, V 2013, ‘Impact of ISO/IEC 20000 series standards on development of an IT service management system’, Calitatea, vol.-134, pp.75.
Steinberg, RA 2013, ‘Measuring ITSM: Measuring, Reporting, and Modeling the IT Service Management Metrics that Matter Most to IT Senior Executives’, Trafford Publishing.
Wan, J & Jones, JD 2013, ‘Managing IT service management implementation complexity: from the perspective of the Warfield version of systems science’, Enterprise Information Systems, vol.-7, no.-4, pp.490-522.
Trusson, CR, Doherty, NF & Hislop, D 2014, ‘Knowledge sharing using IT service management tools: conflicting discourses and incompatible practices’, Information Systems Journal, vol.-24, no.-4, pp.347-371.
Marrone, M, Gacenga, F, Cater-Steel, A & Kolbe, L 2014, ‘IT service management: A cross-national study of ITIL adoption’, Communications of the association for information systems, vol-34.
Melendez, K, Dávila, A & Pessoa, M 2016, ‘Information technology service management models applied to medium and small organizations: A systematic literature review’, Computer Standards & Interfaces, vol.-47, pp.120-127.
Iden, J & Eikebrokk, TR 2013, ‘Implementing IT Service Management: A systematic literature review, International Journal of Information Management’, vol.-33, no.-3), pp.512-523.
Jäntti, M, Rout, T, Wen, L, Heikkinen, S & Cater-Steel, A 2013, June, Exploring the impact of IT service management process improvement initiatives: a case study approach, In International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
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