An organization dedicated to the Project Management Office (PMO) is established for the first time in Korea.
The Korea PMO Holdings Promotion Committee hosted the promoters’ general meeting for Korea PMO Holdings to contribute to the advancement of public informatization projects by nurturing excellent companies dedicated to PMO, at Hotel Samjung in Seoul on the 17th. The PMO Association is to open PMO training courses to train professionals. It also plans to introduce PMO-related licenses to certify capable resources. Policy suggestions will also be made by the Association to vitalize the public PMO projects.
Lee Young-sang, the President of Korea PMO Holdings and CEO of Datastreams, was appointed as the first president of the Association. He commented “the software business is one of the most typical knowledge businesses which can never grow without an environment of fair trade. The standard of ‘fairness’ in any IT development project, to which complex IT technology is applied, cannot be decided by an approach from an ordinary person. Despite the fact that the SIs owned by Korean conglomerates had accumulated the IT development reference for more than twenty years and the Korean government has been ranked first in the evaluation of e-governments worldwide, the Korean software market is still in under very poor conditions, because the uniqueness of the software business is still not understood well enough. When we vitalize the PMO system as a solution to such problem the PMO system will trigger a chain reaction of expert decisions becoming the standard for fairness, the project owners and developers participating in the development under such a standard, and a new ecosphere of knowledge being created.”
Lee commented further, “Korea PMO Holdings will help Korea become a leading country of PMO, such as the U.S. and Germany,by suggesting policies, training PMO experts and introducing private license; striving to accumulate project implementation methodology and know-how in the long-term; creating opportunities that will broaden the awareness on the necessity of professional project management; and helping the professionalized knowledge become an industry of its own.”
As part of a project with the innovative title of ‘Strategy for Establishment of Symbiotic-Growth-Type Software Ecosphere,’ the Software Industry Promotion Act was legislated by the National Assembly in 2012 to vitalize a Korean software market that was still in poor condition. The Korean government attempted to grow its domestic software industry that had weak global competitiveness, by suggesting eleven political tasks in four core policy areas, including the establishment of order and fair trade in the software industry, strengthening the fundamental capacity for software business, vitalizing software convergence and securing a system that will continue the implementation of initiatives, and carrying them forward to involveall parts of the government. The industry paid especially high attention to this Act, because it included some agendas that will block the harmful effects of conglomerate-owned SIs which had been pointed to as the major reason for the desolation of Korea’s software business ecosphere from their root and form a new software business ecosphere. The Korea Software Enterprise Association had established a company named Korea PMO Service (KPMO) and operated it for a year, to allow groups of experts with rich project experience and excellent, professional skills to fill the gap created by the exclusion of conglomerate-owned SIs by vitalizing the PMO system. Lee explained that in the course of such development, Korea PMO Association was established to reflect the voice of industry that the Association needed to carry out the project successfully, independent from government supports, to vitalize the system and allocate the budget, and develop the lessons learned into a knowledge base.
There are many tasks pending, in order for the Korea PMO Holdings to become effective. Most of all, it must suggest policies on the ordering of public PMO projects for the vitalization of the market. There had been only one public informatization PMO project since the effectuation of Software Industry Promotion Act in July last year.