Standards Development

Scope

This document provides highly usable guidance for implementing an ITAM system, and to meet current market demand (determined by a survey and subsequent validation activities). This guidance is intended to be applicable to all ITAM implementations. It is provided in a way which is aligned to ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017 IT asset management systems – Requirements.

The primary audience for this guide is organizations that want to improve their ITAM system. It is assumed that this audience has a basic knowledge of ITAM and of ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017. This guide is focused on incremental improvements to an organization's ITAM system, rather than on certification only. Organizations wishing to achieve certification against ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017 are a secondary target audience for this document.

Purpose

This document meets a need for guidance on implementing ITAM in a way which is consistent with ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017, as well as industry practices. Requests for such guidance have been expressed for over 15 years, including for earlier editions of ISO/IEC 19770-1. For example, the French National body (AFNOR) published in April 2013 "Guidance on the application of NF ISO/IEC 19770-1: 2013" (reference GA Z 67-215) written in French to address this need. In now meeting this need for a wide audience, this proposed document achieves multiple objectives:

• This document provides fairly comprehensive guidance on implementing ITAM which should be usable by most ITAM practitioners.

• This document provides guidance on Management System Standards in a way usable by ITAM practitioners, many of whom do not have experience with such standards.

• This document provides clarification and guidance on some of the topics least well understood about ISO/IEC 19770-1 amongst ITAM practitioners, including mandatory and optional processes, and the use of process tiers; also, other ITAM system dimensions, including data, policies and organisation.

• This document provides clarification on terminology used in the industry and in different sectors which is sometimes differently understood or used, so as to avoid unnecessary problems of communication between practitioners of different disciplines.

• The guidance provided is sufficiently generic that most of it will continue to be applicable even when ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017 is revised. Furthermore, since this is a Technical Specification (TS), it will itself be easily revised to reflect any future updates to ISO/IEC 19770-1.