"ISO MANIA" in Leumi's Information Systems Development (I.T.) Division
On 25 May 2003 a ceremony was held at Leumi's Systems Development site, at which Leumi's Information Systems Development (I.T.) Division was officially certified to be qualified to have obtained the ISO 9001:2000 standard under the ISO 9000-3:1997 directives. This made the I.T. Division the first banking development body to receive the certification, and to become one of the largest software development firms in Israel to have been endowed with this prestigious standard.
At the ceremony, climaxing a two and a half year process, were present Mr. Samuel Zissman Leumi's Head of Human Resources, Mr. Isaac Maalach Head of MATAM, Mr. Sasson Mordechay Head of the I.T. Division, Mr. Ehud Gitai Head of Quality and Certification Division of the Standards Institute of Israel, guests, managers and employees of Leumi's I.T. Division.
The I.T. Division gauge several hundred workers and is Leumi's Software House.
The ISO certification project officially started in February 2001 and was implemented in stages; division by division. After only six months, the first Branch - Management Information Systems - was certified. Following was the Banking IT Systems Division, certified in March 2002, and in April 2003 the Technology Division and Technical Support Branch finalized the certification process.
Each of the divisions / branches involved went through a lengthy procedure that started with mapping out existing systems and services, continuing with improvement of development and maintenance processes, completion of documentation, composition of internal procedures and finally implementation of the procedures and regulated internal examinations.
As in any project of this importance and magnitude, a steering committee was formed, chaired by the head of the I.T. division Mr. Mordechay Sasson, and manned by the heads of all the relevant branches and divisions. At each meeting problems were raised, solutions were formed and of course decisions were made as to the ongoing process of the certification.
During the process for the ISO certification, many firm-wide actions were instigated to ensure overall improvement (e.g. formation of goals and quality assurance policy, lectures on the subject of ISO, refresher courses on bank & QA procedures and MethodA methodology, internal QA auditing, drawing of conclusions and publishing them in a special magazine, statistic analysis of bugs, management reviews, quality goals for products, services and processes all analyzed periodically, client complaints etc).
As in every procedure and project that involves many people, this project called for the dedication of the upper management, cooperation of all the members of the division from management, through department heads, team leaders, project managers, analysts up to the end programmer.
“With work comes an appetite” for more, and it is clear that this is only the beginning of an ongoing process of quality assurance and quality products that are handed over to our clients.
At this point I would like to thank the representatives of the Standards Institution of Israel, headed by Mr. Avital Weinberg, who helped and supported us throughout the entire project (and will continue to do so) and all the members of the I.T. Division and its managers for their cooperation.
Shay Avigdori
Leumi Quality Assurance Department
Mr. Sasson Mordechay Head of the I.T. Division and Mr. Ehud Gitai Head Quality and Certification