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Over the years, L&T
Infotech has seen an increase in operations, addition of more customers
to its portfolio, and a resultant need to liven up the entire IT
infrastructure operations.
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Sudip Banerjee, the CEO of L&T Infotech says that since June 2008, ITIL has been the company's backbone for managing IT infrastructure. Based on ITIL standards, the company got certified for ISO 20000 (earlier called BS 15000) in the month of May 2009. "It's quite unique, and covers all our continuous services, which include application support, infrastructure management services and our internal IT," says Banerjee.
L&T Infotech found that as more continuous services are being sold to its customers, it increased pressure on the existing IT setup. "The trigger came from our own internal IT team, as our operations grew as did our contracts with customers in banking and other industries. There was a need to maintain the robust internal IT infrastructure that guarantees information security requirements, in order to deal with clients from the financial industry," says Banerjee.
The planning and implementation of ISO 20000 took around six months for the IT team. Prior to this, the company had also got certified for BS 7799/ISO 27001. Everything was done in-house, without the involvement of consultants. As ITIL is the foundation for certifications, L&T Infotech ensures that all its professionals who work on application support infrastructure management are certified for ITIL.
As part of the ISO 20000 implementation process, L&T Infotech had to define and improve all the processes, and subsequently integrate them. Training people at different centers was one of the important elements of this process. "It was a rigorous process, in terms of defining the cycle and educating people. Continuous improvement was part of the IT required for continuous improvement," says Banerjee.
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Apart from the existing standards, L&T Infotech uses Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for its software development and maintenance activities. ISO 9000 acts as the over-arching umbrella for all L&T Infotech activities, and ISO 14000 is used for environmental management.
As part of the future initiatives, L&T Infotech is looking at ITIL Version 3. "All of them may not be under ISO 20000, but as soon as they come under ISO 20000, we will go in for a revised certificate. We are also looking at CMMI for services, which is CMMI for software development. They have recently come up with a certification for services," says Banerjee.