PinkVERIFY®

The Industry’s #1 Stamp of Approval for IT Service Management (ITSM) Tools

The PinkVERIFY® Legacy

As IT Service Management (ITSM) capabilities became more and more popular in IT organizations around the world in the 1990s, the number one question asked by IT practitioners became “Which tools will support these new ways of working with ITSM?”

PinkVERIFY, the world’s original and de facto IT Service Management (ITSM) tool certification scheme has been a highly trusted source to answer this question. Since it was launched by Pink Elephant in 1999, there has been two primary goals:

  1. To provide IT practitioners with a quick checklist of tools that meet the functional and terminology requirements of working according to industry best practices for specific ITSM processes.
  2. To provide software vendors with an independent and public verification that their tools meet the functional and terminology requirements of working according to industry best practices for specific ITSM processes.

The scope of the original version of PinkVERIFY was limited to just a few of the more ubiquitous ITSM processes, such as “Incident Management”, “Configuration Management”, “Problem Management”, and “Change Management”.

Over the years more ITSM processes were added, and the criteria for assessments underwent a number of updates to reflect evolving standards and practices.

The 2023 PinkVERIFY

Today, IT practitioners are more reliant than ever on their software toolkit. New techniques and technologies to underpin increases in functionality in turn results in productivity benefits and ever greater dependency on the tools.

We used to say it was impractical to expect best practices to be deployed simply through the introduction of a new tool out-of-the-box. But times really have changed! Now, software vendors are often ahead of the game, developing tools incorporating much more than a common lexicon and consistent definitions for units of work, like “incident” and “problem”. We now see that ITSM has become truly integrated and dependent upon other enabling practices and technologies, including: Lean, Agile and Value Stream Mapping; Scrum; DevOps; machine learning; artificial intelligence; workflow automation; XLA; and organizational change management.

Through this evolution PinkVERIFY has adapted to the changing ITSM landscape, culminating in early 2023 with the biggest change to date.

Pink Elephant’s ITSM subject matter experts have reviewed and amended existing assessment criteria, identified new benchmarks, and adopted a more flexible approach to interpreting terminology that no longer needs to be so prescriptive. This latest PinkVERIFY truly reflects the more practical and real-world approach being taken by IT practitioners with their ITSM goals and requirements – and supports multiple flavors of ITSM frameworks as well as ISO/IEC 20000.

If you are a practitioner looking to ensure the tools you are using or plan to use meet the PinkVERIFY requirements, check out the list below. Also, you may contact Pink Elephant with questions using the Chat window at the bottom of this page or at info@pinkelephant.com. We are happy to expand further with more details about our assessment criteria.

If you are a software vendor looking to present your product to practitioners as PinkVERIFY-certified, then please contact Lisa Lyons at l.lyons@pinkelephant.com