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Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd.
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Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd., has won certification for its attainment of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Level 3 for its banking and basic software departments. With its public services department certified earlier, the company has become Japan's first firm to attain CMMI Level 3 on a company-wide scale. CMM-SW, which concerns software only, is already in wide practice in Japan. By achieving the latest version of CMMI Level 3, or CMM-SW with systems engineering and others built in, Hitachi Software now maintains a global standard systems development process in place. A de facto standard used extensively around the world, including the U.S., CMMI is aimed at boosting a company's software development capability in a staged approach to enhance the quality and productivity of its systems development work.
- Process improvements achieved on a company-wide scale (more than 3,000 employees accredited by CMMI) -
Out of its recognition of the fundamental value of better product quality and higher productivity to successful corporate management, Hitachi Software had been driving a company-wide process improvement campaign since June last year to introduce CMMI-Staged Representation in order to address rapidly changing markets and technologies. The campaign led the company to win a series of certifications for its attainment of CMMI, winning Level 3 for its SE services and application software development department (Public Services System Division) in January, Level 2 for its industrial SE services and application software development department (Industrial Systems Division) in February, Level 3 for its banking SE services and application software development department (Banking Systems Division) in June, and Level 3 for its basic software and product implementation development department (Development Division) in July. Over 3,000 employees accredited by CMMI evidence that process improvements have been achieved on a company-wide basis.
- CMMI levels attained in short times (averaging seven months) -
In the meantime, Hitachi Software has put the following process improvements into action:
Cutting-edge development technologies and recommended case studies have been collected from the development field and formulated into standards, which have been applied across the entire organization of Hitachi Software. The standards themselves have been brushed up at the same time.
(2) Framework in position to ensure thorough compliance with standards
A process QA program has been launched to provide education and audit the status of its implementation in order to ensure thorough compliance with the standards. Further, a system has been built that allows for quick sharing of best practices across the corporate organization and speeds up solutions to reflect changes as they arise.
(3) Organizational reinforcements to keep improvement cycles running
The shares of responsibility to keep a chain of improvement cycles running - recognizing the present status accurately, identifying problems and the measures needed to resolve them, putting the measures into action in the field, validating their effects, and then defining the deficiencies of the measures to work out the next round of improvements - have been defined.
These improvement activities have been pursued on the basis of the production process established by Hitachi Software since its incorporation. Since many of the requirements had already been established, the company managed to attain CMMI levels in short times. According to the latest statistics compiled by the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, the times spent achieving process improvements take 26 months from Level 1 to Level 2 and 24 months from Level 2 to Level 3. Hitachi Software's attainment of CMMI Level 3 took seven months on the average. Hitachi Software is committed to the concept of continuing process improvements to realize one of the world's foremost systems development processes so as to win greater customer confidence.
