Are you a professional association?

[associate]

How is the Society different from a professional association - for example itSMF or ITSMPA.org ???

[vicepresident]

Hi,

The short answer is - no. Given that, it's probably worth offering some additional detail!

SM-S exists to drive two fundamental initiatives:
1. Further the adoption of the Universal Service Management Body Of Knowledge (USMBOK) within the Service Management community (in its broadest sense) allowing us to
2. Run/administer a Service Management Qualification Scheme that will meet the stringent requirements of the American National Standards Institute for Personnel Certification Accreditation (consistent with ISO/IEC 17024)

To help fulfill these initiatives, it's our intention to provide our Associates and certificate holders with a means of having a say in how each of these initiatives will evolve over time. We like to refer to this as responding to the "Voice of the Service Management Professional". In so doing, we also demonstrate our commitment to running community-led management and improvement programs for our initiatives. We do this by establishing appropriate programs, providing mechanisms and tools that enable/facilitate such collaboration and communication.

Now, we believe that a professional association has a different (but not necessarily incompatible) set of goals. By necessity, the itSMF (IT Service Management Forum) or itsmpa.org (IT Service Management Professional Association) need to address a wide range of concerns and content tailored to the special needs and interests of their membership. Two other significant differences worth noting are that SM-S:
* Addresses the field of Service Management generally. We do not restrict ourselves to the world of IT or IT Service Management (more specifically).
* Doesn't conduct any training programs -- related to any of our certificate programs or otherwise.

kengon