What is ISO 37500 about?
ISO 37500 is an international standard that focuses guidance on outsourcing. ISO 37500 covers the main phases, processes, and governance aspects of outsourcing, independent of size and sectors of industry and commerce. ISO 37500 is intended to provide a good foundation to enable organizations to enter and continue to sustain, successful outsourcing arrangements throughout the contractual period.
ISO 37500 gives guidance on:
- Good outsourcing governance for the mutual benefit of client and provider
- Flexibility of outsourcing arrangements, accommodating changing business requirements
- Identifying risks involved with outsourcing
- Enabling mutually beneficial collaborative relationships.
Who is for ISO 37500?
ISO 37500 on guidance for outsourcing is useful for:
- Outsourcing service providers
- Anyone involved in outsourcing in national and international markets
Why should you use ISO 37500?
Around the globe, outsourcing is increasingly an opportunity to add value, tap into a resource base and/or mitigate risk. ISO 37500 aims to provide general guidance for outsourcing for any organization in any sector. ISO 37500 provides a vocabulary for outsourcing practitioners across all industry sectors. ISO 37500 also includes typical outsourcing concepts to improve the understanding of all stakeholders, by providing a set of practices that can be used to manage the outsourcing life cycle.
ISO 37500 starts with the precondition that an organization has already established a sourcing strategy and concluded that outsourcing might be a beneficial approach.
The ISO 37500:
- Covers the entire outsourcing life cycle in four phases, as depicted in Figure 2, and provides definitions for the terms, concepts, and processes that are considered good practice
- Provides detailed guidance on the outsourcing life cycle, processes, and their outputs
- Provides a generic and industry independent foundation, which can be supplemented and tailored to suit industry-specific requirements
- Can be used before, during and after the decision is made to outsource
- Aims to enable mutually beneficial collaborative relationships
