Why does self certification take so long?

[henrym]

Can anyone from ISC2 provide any reason why it takes so long to process a self endorsement from a current CISSP into another certification?  I've passed my CCSP exam on the 3rd of this month, self-certified on the 7th, and was told that it could take six weeks to review my self-endorsement.  An intern should be able to write a script that verifies from the member database that the member is indeed a CISSP in good standing and issue the credential and digital certificate immediately.  Is ISC2 so unsure of their own member database that they can't trust it immediately and must rely on a manual process? 

I'm annoyed at the wait, but also genuinely curious as to what the process possibly could be.

[denbesten]

They have previously stated that everyone waits in the same endorsement queue with no line jumping.

[henrym]

That doesn't explain the need for a queue at all. If they trust the integrity of their membership database, a self certification shouldn't require a queue at all.

[denbesten]

You might review the earlier threads where this was discussed.  

In the general case, endorsement can not be automated because each cert requires experience in one or more of its domains.  Since the domains differ for each cert, endorsement for one cert does not guarantee meeting the experience requirement for any other cert.  CISSP to CCSP is the exception due to the special rule exempting the experience requirement.

But, even automating CISSP to CCSP would need to get investment attention, which is likely difficult given that that process is only used 4 times per day, whereas AMF payments are done 600 times per day and renewal mailings are done 200 times per day. (source: changes to member counts). 

[henrym]

Even if your numbers of four per day are accurate, it would still be worth doing.  If it takes 30 minutes to review one application, that's two hours per day saved.  That time could be spent manually reviewing twenty other people per week.  In one thread cited,  Samantha stated back in December of last year that they were looking at making improvements, but it  doesn't appear that they've done anything.   

If they were serious about their customer services, this is a simple change that could have been done quite a while ago, but for whatever reason they've made their choice.   I've sent e-mails to customer service asking the same question but they just go ignored.  

The point of this thread was to solicit an actual answer from someone official, but based on reading previous threads, it doesn't look likely to happen.  I'd be thrilled to be wrong on this. 

  As several other people have stated, ISC2 is fortunate that there are quite a number of people whose employment and/or extra salary is predicated on maintaining one or more of these certs.   

It's just frustrating.  I'd love this to be an organization I could be proud of my membership in, but their inability to communicate or automate their business processes makes it difficult to respect.

[Kaity]

Hello! 

@denbesten has it correct - everyone waits in the same queue for endorsement and each application is reviewed by a member of our endorsements team. I understand that it has to be this way per ANSI guidelines. I've shared feedback posted in the Community before with the team to see if there's any way to speed it along for members who already hold one of our certifications, but a change to this process isn't as quick to implement as you might hope. Any change to the process of certification goes through rigorous scrutiny before action can be taken. 

[denbesten]

@henrym wrote:

Samantha stated back in December of last year that they were looking at making improvements....   

And those do appear to be paying off. We are now hearing of 4-5 week waits, down from 8-9 in December.  Although it would be great to see this halved again, we need to first celebrate that they are back to the SLA. The (ISC)² approach seems to be staffing up to improve the service level for all endorsees, rather than focusing on a more dramatic improvement for the few in the CISSP->CCSP bucket.

... people whose employment and/or extra salary is predicated on maintaining one or more of these certs.   

Without question, eliminating the "expired cert gap" ought to top the to-do list, primarily due to the extremely high impact (employment and/or extra salary).  After that, improving CPE submissions is pretty important due to wide (100% of the members) and frequent (40/year) impact.  The good news is that a new CPE system is due yet this year.