The Cost Of CMM Deployment In A Conventional IT Organization: A Field Study

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Roshan Pinto
Dan Shoemaker
Gregory W. Ulferts
Patrick Wirtz

Keywords

IT, CMM deployment

Abstract

Over the past decade the software industry has periodically tried to upgrade its business perform-ance by deploying strategic infrastructure frameworks based on expert models. Each of these schemes is aimed at organizing software work along the lines of commonly understood best prac-tice. Their goal is to optimally align the policies and practices of the IT function so that they di-rectly support and further the purposes and goals of the overall business operation (Lewis, 2001).

 

Although there are no authoritative statistics, arguably one of the most popular approaches is the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM v1.1) moreover it is certainly the framework of choice for the U.S. software industry. It was developed out of the research of Watts Humphrey and the Mitre Corporation and was first published by SEI in 1987 (Humphrey, 87a). Operationally, it is designed to advance the software organization’s processes through five stages, or levels, of increasingly effective performance ranging from Chaos (At the initial end) to Optimized (at the high end). The organization adds best practices at each level, which both underwrites improved performance at that particular stage, as well as leverages advancement to the next stage.

 

The problem is that the “best practices” deployed by CMM are both generic and externally (from the company’s perspective) defined. Consequently they require a complicated and expensive implementation process to specifically tailor the model for each organizational situation.  Since the costs of this are concrete and in the near term and the benefits are (to some extent) intangible and long run, the practical question posed by most CEOs is… “Exactly how much will this cost me?” The lack of a definitive answer to that question has been a barrier to adoption, as well as a source of genuine concern among most business executives.

 

So, there have been numerous studies aimed at determining precisely what the costs and benefits of CMM implementation are. These have been conducted primarily in large, or leading edge organizations (these are best summarized in McGibbon, 1999). However, because such businesses are materially different both in their products and their processes, they tend to start from a different point and they have different requirements than the average small IT shop. So the question remains, “what are the factors and exactly how involved and costly is it to implement CMM in a conventional IT setting?”  That is what we are attempting to answer with this research.

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