ISO/IEC 20000 is increasingly seen as the quality standard for IT Service Management and many companies are striving to adopt ISO/IEC 20000, not only for their own benefit but also to help qualify and choose suppliers and partner organisations.

Any organisation is able to claim compliance with an industry standard such as ISO/IEC 20000 and may put such claims in their documentation and other collateral.

However, it is clearly more valuable for such claims to be independently verified as part of a formal certification scheme. ISO 9000 and BS 7799/ISO 17799 are examples where such certification schemes have already been established.

itSMF created, and now manages the ISO/IEC 20000 IT Service Management Certification Scheme (the scheme) which provides this independent verification against ISO/IEC 20000. Operation of the scheme is closely monitored by itSMF to ensure consistency of implementation.

Any organisation wishing to be formally certified against the scheme will need to be assessed by an itSMF Registered Certification Body (RCB). Once the requirements of ISO/IEC 20000 have been satisfied, the RCB will issue a certificate of conformance and the organisation will be eligible to use the itSMF ISO/IEC 20000 logo as a sign of their achievement (the logo appears in the top right of this web site) and may also request a listing on this web site, enabling instant verification by visitors.