Why PinkVERIFY?
I’ve seen something of a buzz in the blogosphere lately about tool certification. Mainly because another consulting firm has decided to come up with another scheme to compare ITSM tools to ITIL.
I really don’t want to get into a discussion about this other scheme (not enough information has been published anyway), and if you want to know what PinkVERIFY really is - then you can find it all at the main web page.
However, I do want to explain a little about the origins of PinkVERIFY, just to set the record straight on some people’s perception that this is some huge money-spinning scheme we have going!
In the late 1990s our Consultants were doing a lot of public speaking about ITIL across the USA and Canada and the number one question was always “This sounds great, but which tools can support ITIL?”
We went first to CCTA (now OGC) and suggested they introduce a scheme where practitioners could check a list to see which ITSM tools matched up to the requirements in two of the books in ITIL V1 - “IT Support Tools” and “IT Delivery Tools” (yes - there really were two books in the original ITIL that explained what to look for in tools!). CCTA said “No thanks - we don’t want to do this”.
We then approached itSMF - same answer. So, we did it ourselves, hence PinkVERIFY - which we designed by referencing those two books in ITIL V1.
The goal has always been to provide advice to practitioners on which tools they might want to put on their short-list; and to give vendors a place where they could show the world that they were making an effort to keep ITIL in mind when building their products. This has never been something we look upon as a major revenue earner at Pink. In fact we have no targets to drive PinkVERIFY business. We look upon it as a service to the industry, and we did it because no one else wanted to. The fees we charge vendors are simply what we think is reasonable to cover our costs for:
1. Doing the initial assessment (it can take anything from half a day up to two days to assess any product - depending on the number of processes it’s aimed to support).
2. Monitoring their use of the logo. Lots of them over the years have “stretched” their claims of how Pink has endorsed their products - we learned very quickly that we need to be constantly vigilant if the PinkVERIFY list is to maintain credibility. So we challenge any vendor that uses the PinkVERIFY logo erroneously, or uses the logo to make claims of compliance (see the web page for our views on “compliance” vs. “compatibility”)
3. Version monitoring of PinkVerified products - to ensure that the vendor only associates the PinkVERIFY logo with the actual version of the product that was assessed. Again, we quickly learned that as new versions of products come out, they sometimes incorporate functional changes which might invalidate their PinkVERIFY status - it has happened! So we keep check of new versions and remind the vendor not to automatically associate this new version with PinkVERIFY. They need to have us check that the new version still deserves PinkVERIFY status. This is why you will sometimes see “old” versions on the list, while a newer version might not have been assessed yet.
So the fees we charge are simply to recover costs, not to make big fat profits! Which, by the way, is why you’ll find PinkVERIFY in the “Research” section of our web site and not the “Products” section.
If you have other questions about PinkVerify that are not answered on the main PinkVERIFY page - I’d be happy to answer them for you.
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David, I’m a journalist working on an article about the OGC certification. Would you have a few moments to discuss this today?
Posted by Matt Stansberry on 05/28 at 11:09 AM