COMBank - first to become CMMi compliant

Achieves best practice milestone in IT management:

A benchmark international standard in Information Technology Management processes implemented at the Commercial Bank of Ceylon has enabled Sri Lanka's most successful private bank to achieve yet another first in the local banking sector.

The IT Research and Development Department of Commercial Bank of Ceylon PLC was recently certified as achieving CMMi Level 3 maturity in relation to software processes practised at the department.

The CMMi certification is based on a benchmark standard developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.

The recent certification makes Commercial Bank the first and only bank in Sri Lanka to be CMMi certified.

Commercial Bank's Chief Information Officer Rohan Muttiah said, "IT management has become mission-critical to banking and leading banks strive to adopt best practices that ensure their IT management, innovation and R&D follow structured and well-defined processes that are aligned to performance goals. CMMi certification is an important stage in this process."

He said the CMMi certification, which is similar to ISO 9001: 2000 certification, helps with alignment to COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) a set of best practices for IT management created by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) and the IT Governance Institute (ITGI).

"The significance of CMMi certification to our customers and other stakeholders is that it ensures that IT management and development at Commercial Bank follow a precise process of defining requirements, validating these requirements, designing, building and testing software solutions that meet requirements and implementing these solutions with minimal disruption of operations and systems," Muttiah said.

The review of Commercial Bank's existing IT management processes and provision of guidance for achieving CMMi compliance was undertaken by Messrs KPMG Ford, Rhodes, Thornton and Co., the local representative member firm of a global professional services organization. The CMMi compliance certification covers Commercial Bank's software development processes for Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. CMMi is a framework to improve software development by introducing auditable disciplines to processes and work practices.

CMMi reduces software development costs through improved translation of business requirements, a high focus on quality, and better project management.

The rigorous audit for CMMi Level 3 covered eighteen processes including integrated project management, risk management, decision analysis and resolution, requirement development, technical solution, product integration, verification, validation, organization process focus, organization definition and organization training.

The CMMi model improves the best practices of previous models in many important ways. CMMi best practices enable organizations to more explicitly link management and engineering activities to their business objectives, expand the scope of and visibility into product lifecycle and engineering activities to ensure that the product or service meets customer expectations and incorporates lessons learnt from additional areas of best practice such as measurement, risk management and supplier management.