OREANDA-NEWS. The Outsourcing Standard and Methodology Committee at NP ASTRA has completed development of the IT Service Catalogue. The document enables all vendors to share a uniform approach to understanding customer needs with regard to IT outsourcing and allows clients to compare 'apples with apples' when evaluating service providers' proposals.

"The need to introduce IT outsourcing service standards arose several years ago. Such rules are often documented as government or industry standards in countries where outsourcing has been occurring for a long time. However, Russia is making early steps in this direction right now. We hope that our initiative will save time and money for all market players, stimulate competition and increase the maturity of the Russian outsourcing services market," says Sergey Makedonsky, Chairman of NP ASTRA.

The document has been developed since 2009 by the Standard and Methodology Committee at NP ASTRA, headed by Alexander Fineboym, Head of Technical Support Outsourcing at CROC. An expert working group represented by IBS, Jet Infosystems, CROC, Optima Services, Fujitsu GDC, Maykor, SBSystem, in4media/Forrester, etc. started out by creating a terminology base. The Russian language IT Outsourcing Glossary includes approximately 100 terms now and authors continue working on it.

Developing the IT Services Catalogue was the next step. The document has three sections. The high-level section is targeted at management and includes a general service description in business language. The second section is more detailed and focuses on top and middle-level IT managers and includes a technical description of approximately fifty services. The third section details the scope of work in order to define the responsibilities for internal IT units and third-party service providers. When developing the catalogue, both the Russian and international practices of the IAOP (US) and NOA (UK) professional associations were considered.

"One of the factors impeding development of the IT outsourcing market in Russia was the lack of generally accepted and clear outsourcing service provision standards for service providers and customers. CROC implemented approximately 2,000 outsourcing projects from 2010 to 2012 and we often faced this situation. A standard IT service catalogue would allow all market players to speak a common language. In addition, we plan to arrange specialized outsourcing training for everyone who would like to learn more about the topic," says Alexander Fineboym, Head of Outsourcing and Technical Support, CROC and Head of the Outsourcing Standard and Methodology Committee, NP ASTRA.