the state of prISM

How is the prISM Institute progressing? Know what it is? No, most people don't.

Recently in a discussion on Back2ITSM page on facebook I had this exchange

Me: nobody has heard of prISM. Even if they had, they would wonder what it has to do with much of the consulting I do, because to most of the market "service management" does not have the grandiose sweep we think it has. I am a New Zealand IT Certified Professional from the local institute (same as UK CITP) which has about a thousand times more cred in this market.
There are plenty of people with any certification who I wouldn't invite in to help. Accreditations or certifications don't prove a lot. I think their main market is for big firms to help justify bringing in strangers (and their outrageous rates).
I tell clients my number one reference is the number of past clients who have engaged me multiple times. 100% of my business comes from people who know me.
27 October at 11:10 · Edited · Like · 5

Ken: I would speculate that as many or more people have heard of priSM as have heard of Rob England. Or Ken Wendle. It's definitely more than "nobody".

Me: Perhaps. I'm not promoting myself as an international standard.
I have 2600 on my mailing list, though I closed it off a few years ago. How many members does prISM have, then?
I'll grant you "nobody" was used rhetorically, but I'm confident that outside a subset of the itSMF membership, nobody in New Zealand has heard of it. And I'd take bets on that being true in many other countries as well.

I can't find any information on membership numbers of prISM, though they do say "We serve members in more than 60 countries" so there are at least 60 members :)
There's a register of credential holders on the web site, and it says it has 234 records. Many of those were grandfathered from the even more obscure Institute of Service Management.

So I ran a poll on this blog. As of Halloween 2014, the results are

Total votes: 135 out of 1203 reads. That's a low response for my polls - reflecting the disinterest - but enough to be meaningful, the proportions have remained steady throughout the polling.

So out of the self-selected population of ITSM-aware people who follow the IT Skeptic 71% either haven't heard of prISM or don't know what it is. So there is no way on god's green earth that a majority of the general IT public have the faintest idea what prISM is.

I'm sorry for all those who threw energy into this thing, but prISM was a mis-conceived idea to start with (I said so in 2009 and again in 2011) and it has died the death it deserved.

[Update:
The proposed Axelos CPD scheme is as doomed as prISM was, for the same reason. I'm not an ITSM consultant or practitioner, I'm in IT. ITSM is just one tool I use.

ITSM as a sector has no role or credibility to accredit me. Whether my fellow ITSMF members are aware of these schemes or not is irrelevant. The ones I want to be aware are the CIOs and ITLTs who employ me, and they don't give a toss about ITSM, they're talking more broadly about IT.

I'm an IT Certified Professional in New Zealand. There is the CITP in the UK. It is the USA's problem that they have no single IT organisation to accredit. Most of the world doesn't have that issue: w ehave our national professional bodies.

The Open Group is working on an international one as Charles Betz reminded me. http://www.opengroup.org/certifications/professional/open-cits ]
[update: The Open Group states that there are 3279 Open CITS cert holders. https://www.opengroup.org/opencits/cert/cert_specdir.tpl ]