Courtesy: ISO/IEC 16023:2000 Information technology International symbology specification
As with most ISO standards, organizations and individuals seek training towards establishing knowledge and excellence in applying the standard. The certification scheme targets organizations, while the qualification scheme targets individuals.
Qualification of individuals is offered by URS, APMG-International, EXIN, PECB, Loyalist Certification Services, TÜV SÜD Akademie, PEOPLECERT, and IRCA. The EXIN, Loyalist and TÜV SÜD program is in fact a qualification in IT Service Management based on ISO/IEC 20000 and includes a Foundation level and several role based certificates: professionals in Align, Deliver, Control and Support, Associate, (Executive) Consultant/Manager and Auditor. The APMG qualifications are focused on getting an organization certified and presume knowledge of IT Service Management is already available. The APMG qualifications are conducted at the Foundation, Practitioner and Auditor level. IRCA and other organizations involved in the certification of auditors have developed their own auditor training and certification for ISO/IEC 20000 auditors.
In terms of certification, there are leading certification bodies around the world, for instance, BSI in UK, Quality Austria in Austria, JQA in Japan, KFQ in Korea and SAI Global in Australia, Asia and Americas.
The importance of certification to ISO/IEC 20000 is not correlated by global adoption. ISO collects the number of certificates issued from the different certification bodies and publishes the results annually in The ISO Survey of Management System Standard Certifications. The 2020 survey reports that 7846 (5461 in China) certificates were issued for ISO/IEC 20000.
ISO/IEC 20000 is the international standard for IT service management. It was developed in 2005 by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 and revised in 2011 and 2018. It was originally based on the earlier BS 15000 that was developed by BSI Group.
ISO/IEC 20000, like its BS 15000 predecessor, was originally developed to reflect best practice guidance contained within the ITIL framework, although it equally supports other IT service management frameworks and approaches including Microsoft Operations Framework and components of ISACA’s COBIT framework. The differentiation between ISO/IEC 20000 and BS 15000 has been addressed by Jenny Dugmore.
The standard was first published in December 2005. In June 2011, the ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 was updated to ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011. In February 2012, ISO/IEC 20000-2:2005 was updated to ISO/IEC 20000-2:2012.