Quality Certifications for Offshore Developers
Application outsourcers use quality certifications as a key competitive differentiator. Enterprises must understand what these certifications mean and how vendors' internal processes have been strengthened by them.
The growing use of offshore service providers (predominantly in India) for mainstream application outsourcing deals is changing the competitive landscape. Most large Indian external service providers (ESPs) emphasize their credentials by pointing to their superior quality certification. However, enterprises that buy offshore application outsourcing services have little understanding of the various quality certification standards and their significance, if any, in terms of increased value. Although enterprises accept that offshore ESPs have "good enough" quality, they are unable to truly assess the competitive advantage of an ESP having, for example, Level 5 certification of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) rather than Level 4. We review a few of the certification and quality standards that have emerged as the most popular among IT service providers.
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) The ISO (www.iso.ch) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from more than 140 countries. It is a nongovernmental body, established in 1947, that promotes the development of standardization in the world. Of particular relevance to IT services is the ISO 900x family of standards. The ISO 900x Family of Standards The ISO 900x standards are general-purpose specifications that apply to all industries, products and services. This family of standards has been in use the longest and has been used by companies across the world in various industries, including, in more recent times, IT service companies.
