FEATURE: IT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
The seven
attributes of
high-performing
IT service
organisations
IT maturity is something that business and IT leaders aspire to
have but is difficult to define. So, what is IT maturity? Excerpted
from Axios Systems’ research paper The IT Maturity Manifesto.
R
esearch from Gartner shows that
average IT maturity levels have
remained static since 2009 –
fluctuating in the range of 2.25 to 2.35
on a scale of 0 to 5; real IT maturity
starts at 3.0. Here, we look at the seven
characteristics of high-performing IT
service organisations and how these
characteristics help achieve IT maturity.
Attribute #1: Outward-
looking perspective
Over the years, business technology
requirements have become more
complex and diverse and IT
departments have done their best,
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INTELLIGENTCIO
sometimes under severe budget
constraints, to service these growing and
changing needs.
The result is a stratified IT ecosystem,
built from a patchwork of legacy
systems that compete for the
attention of IT support people.
This infrastructure ‘spaghetti’ lacks
architecture, stability, flexibility and
robustness meaning IT people are
too busy handling the day-to-day
maintenance to ‘zoom out’ and see
the business context of what they do.
Without an outward-looking
perspective, IT people simply don’t
know if what they are doing right now
is relevant to the business. Unaware of
the business context, time and money
is inevitably wasted on projects and
procurements that don’t support a
business need (when there are plenty
of legitimate business demands
competing for attention).
Without grounding IT activity planning
in the real world, assumptions take
the place of facts and skew priorities.
Outward-looking IT organisations
actively identify and challenge these
assumptions with observations and data
in order to test the collective mindset
of IT, and bring both thinking and
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