The workflow to facilitate the SMPA approach is shown in Figure 3. Mr Paul Collins( Assessment Portal Pty Ltd) reported that their company“… benefitted from the credibility … achieved by allowing( their) software to be independently scrutinized during the project.”“ We also have a commercially viable assessment that can be made available to our client base. Additionally, we have been able to incorporate some of the learnings from the project across our other business assessments, including our new SFIA skills assessment.” Mr Collins said.
Figure 3. Typical Workflow for an Assessment Facilitator using the Decision Support System
The SMPA approach can be used to conduct self-assessments specifically for small and mid-size organisations that do not have sufficient budget to conduct comprehensive process assessments. The SMPA tool also allows IT service organisations to self-assess the capability of their ITSM processes which can produce more successful audits. The SMPA approach can assist auditors to conduct formal assessments by providing a dataset of testimony evidence for assessments. Practitioners can use the assessment results from the SMPA approach to benchmark their firm or business unit against other firms or business units.
Process assessment automation will not completely upstage the need for trained professionals with organisations choosing to implement a hybrid of software automation and human insights for process assessments. Mr. Paul Fendley( Toowoomba Regional Council) states that“ Council … identified prioritized areas for improvement and will use a cost-effective combination of human assessed and automated / self-survey assessment to measure progress.” This hybrid assessment solution of automation and trained professionals was favoured at Toowoomba Regional Council and is likely the way of the future.
The SMPA project team at the Australian Information Industry Association( AIIA) event in July 2015( Left to Right) Dr. Nick Tate( ACS QLD Branch Chair), Dr. Anup Shrestha, Mr. Paul Collins( Assessment Portal Pty Ltd), Professor Aileen Cater-Steel, Hon Leeanne Enoch( Minister for Science and Innovation QLD)
For further details of the SMPA approach, contact Prof Aileen Cater-Steel( email Aileen. Cater-Steel @ usq. edu. au). Research articles on SMPA are available from USQ’ s e-prints repository Click here
15 itSMF Bulletin— February 2017