A new publication from OGC highlights three good reasons why an ISO20000 certification of an organisation does not provide ITIL V3 certification (and the last one applies to ITIL V2 as well).

OGC have replaced the white paper on differences between ISO20000 and ITIL by Jenny Dugmore and Alison Holt (summarised here - does anybody have the original document?) with a new paper by Jenny Dugmore and Sharon Taylor, updated for ITIL V3 and more systematically addressing the differences.

This paper is second in a 'series' from OGC, following on from one that covered ASL. The conclusion of that ASL paper is that ITIL and ASL are "Living Apart Together". The IT Skeptic's interpetation: they have divorced but stay in touch occasionally. More on ASL in another post.

We look forward to the remaining COBIT paper as perhaps the most useful of the three (and probably the hardest to do).

Studying this latest ISO20000 paper reveals three reasons why ISO20000 certification of an organisation is NOT ITIL certification:

1. ISO20000 only recognises the management of financial assets, not assets which include "management, organization, process, knowledge, people, information, applications, infrastructure and financial capital", nor the concept of a "service asset". So ISO20000 certification says nothing about the management of 'assets' in an ITIL sense.
2. ISO20000 does not recognise CMS or SKMS, and so does not certify anything beyond CMDB
3. An organisation can obtain ISO20000 certification without recognising or implementing the ITIL concept of Known Error, usually considered essential ITIL.

N.B. Yeah yeah, I know it is called ISO/IEC 20000. "Stop calling him Bert. His name is Engelbert".