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The
Quality Bug
Business Today, January 10, 2003
The
world’s toughest quality assessment for software companies
is Carnegie Mellon’s SEISM CMM® 5. Guess which country has the
most of it? India, of course,
Imagine if
70 percent of all the noble prizes ever won belonged to India.
Impossible? Damn right. But what do you say to this: Of the 78
companies assessed world-wide at SEISM CMM® level 5 –
considered the ultimate test of quality for IT services
companies – 54 of them are wither Indian companies or India
operations of IT multinationals. Some prominent assesses
include TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant, I-flex and Polaris
Software. In contrast, only 12 US companies have the same
level of certification.
For
a country known as a traditional laggard in quality this is a
rare achievement. What does this certification mean? Does it
provide a competitive advantage to companies that have these
certifications? Says Navyug Mohnot, Managing Director, QAI, which handholds Indian companies during the CMM®
assessment: “It is taken for granted that companies bidding
for large software services projects will have this
certification. That is why Indian companies have a distinct
advantage in the international marketplace.”
But
what is SEISM CMM®? SEISM refers to Carnegie Mellon University’s
Software Engineering Institute, which started work on a
“capability maturity
model” (CMM®) beginning the mid – 80s on request from the
US defence to review its software problems. Since then,
different levels of CMM® have been developed, ranging from –
in increasing order of complexity – 1 to 5.
Motorola
India Electronics was the first company in India to get a SEISM
CMM® certification in 1994. Since then, a number of Indian
companies, starting wit Infosys, Wipro and more recently
Kshema Technologies, have put themselves through the
assessment.
How
does a CMM® 5 company differ from a CMM® 4 or no CMM® company?
The difference will essentially be in the two companies’
ability to manage complex processes, change with new
technology and prevent defects. Says Anand Mutalik, Chief
Technology Officer of Kshema Technologies: “Indian companies
that were struggling with enhanced complexity found SEISM CMM® to
be a robust model, which would help them in continues process
quality improvement”
Not
all think CMM® is a good measure of a company’s process
capabilities. But
that population is a minority. After all, software is
procedural knowledge. Therefore, all knowledge-enabled or
knowledge-intensive firms have to inevitably “induct”
software systems to meet changing business requirements
without losing customers. Says K. Subrahmaniam, CEO, Covansys
India: “CMM® is for everybody – for doing business better
if they depend extensively on software.”
At
the Nasscom-Gartner summit in Mumbai in September last year,
when the topic of CMM®5 assessment came up, one of the tech
CEOs explained how it helps. “When you tell customers that
you are a level 5 company,” he said, “they shut up and
listen.” Now, you know why Indian techies don’t get asked
a lot of questions.
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