Virtual Centre for quality certification The Hindu Business Line, February 7, 2003 With the  software services industry getting extremely competitive and stringent quality norms becoming he order of the day, the only way forward is to constantly endeavour to address quality norms. While the Indian IT services sector is a step ahead in this direction, others have a long way to go, according to Mr Mick Spiers, Senior Consultant, Quality Assurance Institute India Ltd. (QAI) Mr Spiers told Business Line that there were a few key trends that distinguished the Indian companies from those in Australia, Singapore and in the European Union. While Indian software services companies have already scaled companies have already scaled up the quality chain, it is still a long way to go for their counterparts in these countries. A virtual center of excellence was being created by the institute to address these certification-related services where anywhere across the globe could access it. They could then be trained to address all quality-related certification issues, Mr Spiers said. QAI is a joint venture between QAI (US) and Intecos India. Apart from India, it has chapters in several places and is amongst the premier knowledge companies in software and management. It seeks to enhance improvements in processes and performance of organizations. Over 30 plus companies have already been certified to SEISM CMM® Level 5. But this is not an end in itself. The effort now is driven towards CMMI® – capability maturity model-integrated appraisals that seek to combine the best of all areas of software development including improvement in programmes. The CMMI®-based process improvement process improvement programme had been adopted by Infosys, Wipro and Polaris. Others were in the process of evolving strategies to address this important issue, which would be a distinguishing factor between one company and another. More projects would be outsourced to companies with such integrated practices, Mr Spiers said. The other area that will require constant skill upgradation and higher quality standards in India is the issue of IT- enabled services and business process outsourcing. Back