Centers of Excellence Pioneering  a unique business model, fostering a culture of innovation, at Ness, we help set up, mature and grow client companies through a distinctive extended development center (EDC) culture . While each EDC is unique in terms of its domain, processes and methodologies, the Ness Centers of Excellence serve as a knowledge convergence channel representing the companies’ best practices that help teams imbibe, train, grow and apply the learning across EDCs, while protecting client Intellectual Property (IP).     Architecture Council     Software Testing Council     Quality Council Architecture Council    Mission The mission of enterprise architecture council is to successfully “manage change” and to reduce “time to market” in order to achieve enterprise alignment and integration. The council defines a consistent set of reusable principles, practices, policies and models derived from business requirements to achieve definitive success, thereby guiding decision-making and the engineering of EDC’s information systems and technical infrastructure.  Enterprise Architecture The sustainable competitive advantage of an enterprise is derived from the “synergy" of the firm’s various capabilities that are complementary. Enterprise architecture is the high-level structure of enterprise systems that facilitates synergy leading to enterprise alignment and integration paving the way for the maturity of the IT industry. It can be viewed as a layered model addressing various requirements of an enterprise, which include the following: a)         Business architecture:  Refers to the business processes and supporting organizational structure b)         Application/software architecture: Indicates architecture of applications that support the business processes c)         Technology architecture: Addresses the infrastructure that supports the applications d)         Information/data architecture: Refers to the information that supports the applications    The Value Proposition The key differentiator of enterprise architecture from that of business unit architecture and product/service level architecture is its enterprise scope. This allows enterprise architects to create an architectural platform that is the springboard for resounding competitive advantage.  By focusing on strategic differentiators and working across the enterprise, there is a unique opportunity to create synergies and avoid duplication and inconsistency across the enterprise.   Enterprise Architecture is truly an iterative process and the first run through the phases of development is meant to be a learning process. As such, the steps in the process are not meant to be rigid, but to be flexible in order to find the best fit. Software Testing Council    Mission To assist in improving the understanding and competency of quality/testing practices and deploying the knowledge, best practices and methodologies across all EDCs in Ness   To accomplish this we will identify, define, document and champion generally accepted quality/testing practices.    Vision Excellence in the software testing practices of projects through standards/best practices, which are widely recognized and consistently applied across Ness EDCs. The business model of Ness Technologies provides opportunity to setup, grow and mature various EDCs under the  Ness umbrella. Each EDC is unique in terms of their domain, processes, methodologies and business workflow processes. The growth path of each EDC passes through many challenges. Meeting these challenges is a great learning experience to the workforce driving the success of the EDC. Over time, Ness has accumulated a great pool of expertise best practices and hands on experiences to lead its clients to success. This knowledge base is scattered across various EDCs. Ness management has felt a need to leverage this scattered strength of Ness by setting up a framework to make the best use of it. The establishment of “software testing council” is a part of the Ness management strategic plan.             Quality Council    Mission The mission of the quality council is to promote employee participation in process definition, implementation and improvement across all extended development centers [EDCs] and support groups at Ness. The Council would specifically focus on product engineering best practices and lessons learned that could be suitably adopted in EDCs.  The council will focus on continuously innovating in order to find ways to improve and excel to ensure faster, better, more cost effective services to the clients, at a sustainable pace.  The quality council will also extend their services to help Ness clients set up their quality management system and assist with quality certification initiatives.    Process Engineering At Ness, process engineering is an iterative process, and the first run through the phases of definition, implementation and verification is meant to be a learning process which leads to further process improvement for easy, effective execution. Our clients are successful product development companies, and they provide the necessary direction for implementing product engineering activities. At the EDC establishment stage, the client processes for technical activities are integrated with Ness processes for communication and management to form a complete set of processes for remote product engineering and management.        The organizational process engineering team will serve to help the EDCs and corporate business and engineering functions in streamlining processes, sharing best practices and handling process interventions based on our rich knowledge and experience of running offshore Managed Labs.     The Value Proposition Ness was recently assessed CMMI Level 3 for the EDC model.  With other companies expanding into our domain, it is necessary that we capture and manage our EDC / project / technical knowledge in order to generate more business and maintain our competitive edge.  As insurance against staff retention / dislocation in the current volatile market situation, it is imperative that we effectively manage the knowledge present in our teams and disseminate these practices to all existing employees to ensure that Ness is a process, rather than people, dependent company.      Our primary aim would be to set up EDC/support process facilitation teams that can handle process facilitation and audits, and pilot and institutionalize process methodologies that best suit the EDC functioning based on client requirements.  The quality council would provide a forum for these teams to share their EDC experiences, and get immediate feedback for problems faced.   The quality council will work on establishing and maintaining a knowledge repository that can be used to service requests on product development, software engineering and EDC setup and management.  These requests may typically be from EDCs within our India centers, for the purpose of client visits, from other companies under the Ness Technologies umbrella, and also the sales team when showcasing Ness capabilities during the sales cycle, and continued engagement.     To help in effective decision-making, and also showcase our capability in EDC management and product engineering, we need to set up and maintain an organizational metrics program.  This initiative will help us measure our profitability, productivity, schedule management, etc. and ensure the achievement of our quality objectives of providing faster, better and cost effective services to our clients.   Many of our clients are an amalgamation of acquired / merged companies and have seen unparalleled, quick paced growth in the last few years.  As our offshore EDC teams have first-hand experience of implementing our client processes, we can add value in integrating their varied processes for product engineering and management in order to ensure standardized functioning across multiple sites, and leverage the best practices existing in various pockets in their company.