A Study on software industry organizational performance indicators and industry standard accreditations

Abstract

The demand for the global standings and enhanced technologies in IT industry is growing rapidly. However, in the fulfilment of this requirement, Sri Lanka is faced with problems in meeting the industry demand for trained IT professionals, advanced technologies and expectations on compliance with industry standards. In Sri Lanka too, software industry is viewed as a major economic driving force therefore, its performance therefore is critical to the national economic development, improvements in technology and in the upgrading of the county‟s profile as a top software development destination. For the continued development and for the improved recognition of Sri Lankan software industry, it is important that organizational performance is measured and critically analyzed so that appropriate actions can be taken to improve processes and practices. In view of that objective, the focus of this thesis has been to study the performance indicators used by software industry and how they are impacted by industry standard accreditations. The motive being, that there is a very important connection between industry standard accreditation, industry development and industry performance. The main objective of many software organizations to achieve industry accreditations is to establish global recognition, so that software organizations could claim that their business standings in par with that of international software developers in terms of technology process and practices. Due to the importance given by the software industry organization for the need to prescribe to industry standard accreditations, it is important to see how that kind of accreditation impacts the organization performance. Another objective is an organization could be to explore the possibility of accreditations. The first objective of a performance conscious software organization is to recognize the suitable accreditations and find out the suitable models of evaluating them. The second objective is to find out how they could improve themselves using the new accreditations. The hypothesis of this thesis covers the relationship between software industry standard accreditations and important issues such as financial performance, employee work satisfaction and company business process improvement. The research findings show that there is a strong positive correlation among these combinations. Another interesting research results of this study show that more than 65% of software companies have their own internal standards and the highest focus area is for obtaining accredited standards for the software development process followed by document handling. Also the research reveals the most important factor sited by the industry for engaging in standard accreditations is for improving product quality followed by improvements to productivity.