Biography

Masaharu Niwa is the manager of ITSS center in IPA, Japan. IPA is incorporated administrative agency of Japanese METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). He joined IBM, Japan in 1980. Developed and maintained IBM internal application system. Changed to SCM department of system development　as project manager. In 2005, became DPE (Delivery Project Executives) of IT outsourcing.. Since 2007, present post. His specialty is project management, software engineering, and human resource development.

Abstract

Skill Standards for IT Professionals (hereafter ITSS) is developed to strengthen IT industry in response to the shift from product intensive to service oriented business. The objective of ITSS is to promote effective capital investment for human resource development in the IT service industry. For this objective, ITSS classifies jobs in IT service industry into 11 categories and provides the indices to assess IT Professionals for the perspective of results and skills. The IT Skill Standards Center in Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) was established to promote and maintain the ITSS to realize the IT industry policy of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

In this session I'll explain the backgrounds, related schemes and overview of ITSS, such as the structure, contents of job category, level and relationship of IT Engineers Examination, also hosted by IPA. In later part, I'll explain the activities of ITSS worldwide promotion, approaches to European IT standards related organizations and ITSS deployment support in Asian countries.

Presentation Slides (PDF)