dxw is now ISO 20000-1 certified
We’ve always been a company that puts security first, so we have tight change control and incident processes
We recently received confirmation that dxw has been awarded ISO 20000-1 certification. We’re pleased about this, and thought it was worth a short post explaining what it means for us and our clients.
ISO 20000-1 is an international standard for IT service management. It describes a set of practices for how an organisation plans, delivers, and improves the services it runs and it covers things like how changes are handled, how incidents are dealt with, and how the needs of service users feed back into our day-to-day work.
The vast majority of our clients come from the public and charity sectors, and they operate in environments where things going wrong have real consequences for real people. We’ve always managed our services in the best interests of our clients and their service users, and working towards the certification gave us a structured way to look honestly at where our processes were inconsistent or under-documented, and fix them.
The audit took around 6 months from initial analysis to final sign-off. It involved almost every member of staff who works on our service desk and several colleagues from our commercial operations unit as well as the company Directors. This wasn’t a quick exercise and it required a lot of coordination and reflection.
Some of what we changed was fairly straightforward: documenting processes that we all know well but hadn’t written down, re-organising existing information into fewer places, and communicating some of our practices more widely around dxw. We’ve always been a company that puts security first, so we have tight change control and incident processes, but now we apply that same discipline to organising our processes and documentation across all of our support services.
A certificate on its own doesn’t mean very much, so it was good to see that our stage 2 audit noted we had used this process to look deeply at all our practices and see how they could be improved in the longer term.
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