ITIL® and ISO 20000 - How to prepare for IT service certification?

After the agrarian era, our civilizations passed through the industrial era with its machinismo, and then we arrived at the age of information and dematerialization. Professions are transforming to meet the demands of this new type of economy.

Manufacturers of manufactured products are increasingly integrating services into their offerings. So much so, in fact, that sometimes it's the services offered that are commercially promoted and rewarded. Products are becoming so unimportant that they are sometimes given away for free.

To promote the quality of their products, manufacturers have been looking for ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors. To help them in this, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has developed standards and the possibility of certifying their management systems against these standards. Today, the same applies to Information Technology service providers.

In this field, instead of starting from theoretical considerations and building a complex and difficult-to-implement "system", the profession has benefited from best practices from the field, collected within the ITIL methodology ^® . This operational basis for IT operations is used to organize clearly identified processes with their own sound management rules. This framework of best practices has been taken over by ISO and completed with the elements needed to structure a Service Management System. The result is contained in the two ISO/IEC 20000 standards. Any IT service provider can apply for certification, provided they meet the requirements of the first part of these standards. The aim of this article is to outline the success factors for effective preparation.