Industry Standard

ISO/IEC 38500:2008, Corporate governance of information technology, provides a framework for effective governance of IT to assist those at the highest level of organizations to understand and fulfill their legal, regulatory, and ethical obligations in respect of their organizations’ use of IT. ISO/IEC 38500 is applicable to organizations from all sizes, including public and private companies, government entities, and not-for-profit organizations. This standard provides guiding principles for directors of organizations on the effective, efficient, and acceptable use of Information Technology (IT) within their organizations.

The standard will assist directors in assuming conformance with obligations – regularly, legislation, common law, contractual – concerning the acceptable use of IT and to have a proper corporate governance of IT.

The framework comprises definitions, principles and a model. It sets out six principles for good corporate governance of IT:
- Responsibility;
- Strategy;
- Acquisition;
- Performance;
- Conformance;
- Human behaviour.

The eTOM (enhanced Telecom Operations Map) is a guidebook, the most widely used and accepted standard for business processes in the telecommunications industry. The eTOM model describes the full scope of business processes required by a service provider and defines key elements and how they interact.

eTOM is a common companion of ITIL, an analogous standard or framework for best practices in information technology.

Both of these frameworks are part of the larger context of Total Quality Management, in which many industries have since 1950 increasingly formalized their business processes and metrics in search of higher quality, fewer defects, and greater efficiency. ISO 9000 is probably the best-known of these "process and results improvement" standards, but it is far more generic than either eTOM or ITIL.

eTOM has been adopted as ITU-T International Recommendation, known in 2004 as M.3050.