The most important thing about documentation in new version of the standard is that it refers to it as "documented information" and this term includes both documents and records. There are far less requirements for documentation in 2015 revision of the standard, there is no longer requirement for Quality Manual and six mandatory procedures as in 2008 revision.
In order to conduct the transition, you need to update your existing documents to adapt them to new requirements. Almost every requirement is altered to some extent and clause numbering is changed so every document will require at least minor updates. Also you will have to decide whether to keep the documents and procedures that are not mandatory any more, for example although the manual is no longer mandatory, lots of companies decide to keep it because they find it useful for their QMS.
Answer:
ISO 27001 is developed for the establishment of an Information Security Management System, which means that this standard is for the protection of the information, so, basically ISO 27001 gives you a framework to identify risks and treat them implementing security controls, many of them are directly related to IT (but not all). So, this standard is not specifically developed to perform an IT audit, but you can use their security controls, although in the Annex A of ISO 27001 you can find a brief description of 114 security controls, while in the ISO 27002 you can find the same security controls but with a guide about how to implement each control.
So, maybe you can use the Annex A of ISO 27001 to select a group of security controls that you want to audit (related to IT), and if you need more information about each control you can see ISO 27002.
First, it would be better to implement ISO 14001:2015 because in this way you will avoid the transition process within next two years.
The first step in implementation of ISO 14001 is to conduct GAP analysis to determine to what extent the organization already meets the requirements of the standard. The next step is to develop project plan with defined activities and documents to be created in order to achieve full compliance with the standard. Then you need to create documents and update your processes so they align with the standard.
After the implementation, you need to conduct internal audit and management review to ensure that your EMS (Environmental Management System) is compliant with the standard and finally you can hire certification body to conduct certification audit and issue your company the certificate.
The process owners are defined usually in the prat of the procedure that describes purpose, scope and users. In our documentation, it is the section 1 of each procedure.
OHSAS 18001 and transition to ISO 45001
Answer:
Purpose of both ISO 45001 and OHSAS 18001 is to help organization establish occupational health and safety management system. Currently, only OHSAS 18001 is published while ISO 45001 is in development, so at this point organizations can only implement OHSAS 18001.
Once ISO 45001 is published (and this is expected in September 2017) organization will be able to choose between those two standards and tailor their system according to one or both of them. If you decide to implement OHSAS 18001 and later to make transition to ISO 45001, you will have to update your system in order to make it ISO 45001 compliant.
In this way you will do most of the work during implementation of OHSAS 18001 and later you will have to update the system and this wouldn't take too much time but it is hard to say at this point since the ISO 45001 is not published yet and we are n ot certain how much will it differ from OHSAS 18001. Given the experience with transition of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 the changes between OHSAS 18001 and ISO 45001 will be between 10 and 30% so the transition wouldn't require some big effort.
First difference is in fact that environmental aspects must be documented while risks and opportunities don't. Regarding environmental aspects the company must define methodology for their evaluation and criteria for determining their significance. The process of identification and evaluation of environmental aspects is focused primarily on processes and their environmental impacts while risks can emerge from any part of context of the organization.
Addressing risks and opportunities according to ISO 14001 does not require documented procedure, established methodology or even a registry of records, it only requires to take actions to address them and to monitor effectiveness of these actions.
Answer:
Of course! We have an easy method to implement the standard, composed by 16 steps. This method is applicable for any company, including a medium size insurance company:
1.- Obtain management support
2.- Treat is as a project
3.- Define the scope
4.- Write an ISMS Policy
5.- Define the Risk Assessment methodology
6.- Perform the risk assessment & risk treatment
7.- Write the Statement of Applicability
8.- Write the Risk Treatment Plan
9.- Define how to measure the effectiveness of controls
10.- Implement the controls & mandatory procedures
11.- Implement training and awareness programs
12.- Operate the ISMS
13.- Monitor the ISMS
14.- Internal audit
15.- Management review
16.- Corrective and preventive actions
Answer: ISO 27001 specifically calls these documents "policies", so if you select those controls as applicable then you should call them this way; of course, you can write also additional guidelines which would be much more detailed whereas you can leave policies rather general.
The reason I ask is because our Board has to endorse all policies and for just ISMS, these are becoming quite heavy. As you can imagine, yearly endorsements of all policies within the company is a tremendous job anyway. Any advice would be helpful & appreciated.
Answer: I'm not sure why would your board need to approve all the policies - you can define a rule by which they need to approve only the top-level documents like the Information Security Policy, implementation s trategy or the budget; you can specify in that rule that detailed policies can be approved by someone else in your organization.
ISO 27001:2013 do not define risk methodology, only requirements on risk assessment and risk treatment process. There are many examples for risk methodologies, I would only generally divide them in quantitative and qualitative (or combine) risk assessment.