A Maturity Model for Offshore Software Development Centres

Abstract

Software outsourcing has proven to be a great success for many companies worldwide. CIOs from these organizations develop IT strategies to support the vision of an enterprise in terms of growing their businesses. Delivering quality projects on time and within budget is a CIO’s promise to the other senior executives. Assessing and selecting mature offshore development centres (ODC) during their annual reviews becomes a critical item on a CIO’s agenda. In this paper, we are going to introduce a maturity model for an Offshore Development Center. It makes no significant difference whether the centre is wholly owned by the organization initiating software projects or it is a 3rd-party partner of this organization. The model has been developed based on best practices of 3 well-known international banks managing offshore software projects across countries and time zones. This model works well to serve the aforementioned Wall Street firms’ IT strategies. For non-banking industries, this maturity model works just as well, as these best practices are not industry-specific.