Two of the world's largest technology users, General Motors Corp. and the U.S. Department of Defense, are backing a proposed set of best-practices guidelines for IT purchasing as a way to help organizations reduce the risks and costs of projects.

But it's uncertain whether the multiyear effort to create a new version of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) framework that is focused on the acquisition of IT products and services will convince many companies to change their internal processes. The guidelines are spelled out in a daunting document and, as with other CMMI process standards, could take several years for users to master.

"It's 441 pages of process methodology talk, and very few outside of the largest organizations and IT shops are going to have the time and energy to invest in that," said Jeff Muscarella, a partner at management consulting firm NPI Inc. in Atlanta. "You have to be kind of a process zealot to want to wade through it."

The CMMI for Acquisition, or CMMI-ACQ, standard was announced by the Carnegie MellonSoftware Engineering Institute during a teleconference held on Nov. 7. The Pittsburgh-based SEI developed the guidelines with IT users and vendors in response to the increasing use of packaged software and external services.

The first public release, called Version 1.2, is based on a draft that GM submitted to the SEI last year. Ralph Szygenda, the automaker's CIO and the leading advocate for the standard, said during the teleconference that he is confident that it "will fast become the model of choice for IT acquisition and supply chain management."

"I think this has gone a long way to standardize some processes, so that both the supplier and acquirer are speaking the same language," Szygenda said.

His advocacy for having a purchasing standard was sparked by GM's decision to outsource most of its IT operations to multiple vendors, a process that culminated early last year when the company awarded six vendors contracts worth a total of about $7 billion. To avoid a Tower of Babel situation, GM defined a set of standard IT processes that all of the suppliers must follow.

Before it did so, GM was "buying more than we were building but didn't have the acquisition standards" to make the purchasing process as efficient as it could be, Szygenda said. So in 2004, he began working with the SEI, believing that a standardized approach could help GM and other companies.

Intensive Guidelines

The CMMI-ACQ document provides a broad overview of process methodologies and then goes into exhaustive detail about IT purchasing procedures. For instance, it moves from advising organizations to make sure that they have the required funding, facilities, skills and tools in place to discussing methods for keeping track of and addressing product defects.