Philips Speech Processing Dictation Software Announces Re-certification

VIENNA, AUSTRIA -- Philips Speech Processing, a provider of speech recognition technology and hardware, announced its ISO 9001 re-certification. Since 1989, when Philips Speech Processing was the first Austrian company to receive ISO 9001 certification, the company has passed every re-certification. ISO 9001 is the international standard for quality management systems that is accepted around the world. At the same time the software division also announced the achievement of level three of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), a model to assess the quality of software providers. This standard was initially developed by the US department of defense as a means of selecting software providers. Today it is supervised by the Software Engineering Institute, based at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. The Capability Maturity Model is used to judge the maturity of the software processes of an organization. It consists of key practice areas which are assessed individually in order to gauge the maturity of the processes. The model has five levels: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed and Optimized. Each level requires that the strict criteria of an increasing number of key process areas are fulfilled. To achieve level three, thirteen aspects ranging from Requirements Management, Software Project Tracking and Oversight through to Organisational Process Definition, Inter-group Co-ordination are assessed. Each area is measured through employee interviews and document compliance checks. Philips Speech Processing Dictation Software has now achieved level three where it joins leading high end software developers such as business units of IBM, Motorola or Siemens. Tom Stolk, General Manager, Philips Speech Processing, says: "We are very proud to have been awarded both achievements. Especially the achievement CMM level three shows that we are one of only a small number of companies with defined high quality software processes in place, an important factor in the ever-evolving area of speech recognition technology." Today only 23.4% Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University of all software companies aiming for a CMM qualification have achieved level three, with 5.6% on level four and only 4.8% on level five. Independent consultants from Cap Gemini Ernst Young carried out the assessment.