The ITIL framework has been in existence since the mid 1980’s. It has acted as the defacto standard for IT Service Management for many years. A central message for the ITIL framework is to 'adopt the framework and then adapt to it'.

However, there is now an international standard that defines requirements that have to be met in order for an implementation of Service Management to be considered complete.

Organisations often have difficulty in ways to approach Service Management in a structured and consistent manner. So the ISO/IEC 20000 standard (December 2005), to provide this level of consistency on an international basis.

The ISO/IEC 20000 standard requires organisations to demonstrate evidence of a minimum set of requirements across IT service Management disciplines. There are 217 requirements that an IT service organisation needs to comply with - to be able to demonstrate that it is providing a good quality service to its customers. The standard itself was actually based upon a British Standard, the BS 15000 Standard originally.

The scope of ISO/IEC20000:2005 is much broader than that defined in the ITIL framework – the standard outline can be summarised by Figure 1 (click to view).