This Recommendation | International Standard:

• provides an overview to the family of systems management standards;
• establishes the basis for partitioning the systems management standards into separate groups, specifying the scope of each group and identifying the principal components within each group;
• gives guidance on the development of systems management standards and identifies the way they relate to each other;
• defines terms for use by other systems management standards;
• is applicable to the definition of all systems management standards and to all aspects of systems management of whatever scale;
• is applicable to situations in which the responsibility for systems management is centralized and those where it is decentralized;
• establishes a model for systems management, identifies several aspects of systems management (i.e. information, functional, communications, and organizational), and further refines the model to clarify these aspects;
• identifies the principles governing conformance requirements and conformance claims to systems management standards.

There are no conformance requirements on the main body of this Recommendation | International Standard, however it does specify requirements on standards claiming compliance to systems management.

Annex A defines an application context for systems management and specifies the rules for negotiating systems management functional units. There are conformance requirements associated with these rules.