IT maturity is a key priority for CIOs. In fact, in a 2021 Gartner I&O survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents cited achieving IT maturity as their primary goal. But achieving IT maturity requires shifting away from legacy systems and manual processes.
Take the events of early 2020. IT teams scrambled to ensure users had the technology they needed to be productive from home. Most teams were not prepared for these events and in some cases severely overspent to meet the immediate crisis. Now, facing an unstable global economy, budgets are getting tighter, staffs are getting smaller, and expectations are getting higher. IT must maintain evergreen programs like asset lifecycle management, Windows upgrades, and server upgrades, while tackling larger transformation programs like cloud migrations.
Those using mature, flexible processes to maintain program quality, leverage assets efficiently, and rapidly respond to external and internal requirements are going to fare best during change. For this reason, more leaders are turning to models such as the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) to help assess their current level and define a path to the level that aligns best with their business goals.
CMMI Maturity Levels
CMMI sets out the levels of maturity as follows:
- Maturity Level 0: Incomplete. Work may or may not be completed.
- Maturity Level 1: Initial. Processes are unpredictable, poorly controlled, and reactive. Work gets completed but is often delayed. Inefficiencies lead to higher risks and costs.
- Maturity Level 2: Managed. Work is managed on a project basis; processes are categorized by those projects and are frequently reactive.
- Maturity Level 3: Defined. Organization-wide standards provide guidance across projects, programs, and portfolios. Processes are well-characterized and well-understood. The organization is more proactive than reactive.
- Maturity Level 4: Quantitively Managed. A data-driven organization using quantitative data to implement predictable processes that meet organizational goals.
- Maturity Level 5: Optimizing. Organization’s focus is on continuous improvement with stable and flexible processes allowing it to be agile in responding to change.
Identifying your maturity level
How do your processes measure up? Organizations that want to understand how their business aligns with CMMI will undertake a formal appraisal. There are some ways to identify if you have room for improvement.
How do you:
- Manage onboarding/offboarding employees? If HR, business unit, and IT cycles aren’t aligned, then end users may not be productive from day one. Can you easily track, reclaim and reuse equipment from leavers for new employees to make the best use of technology investments?
- Identify security vulnerabilities? Are you managing cyber risks by keeping on top of OS updates and patches across your IT estate as a growing number of end user and smart IoT devices are added? Do you know what’s being accessed in the cloud?
- Maintain compliance? Every industry is governed by regulations, but some carry higher penalties for non-compliance. Healthcare, financial institutions, and other industries need to track assets with pinpoint accuracy to keep data secure and maintain clear records that confirm they are doing what they say they are. How does your IT asset lifecycle management program measure up? Can you be sure your organization isn’t risking non-compliance?
- Apply a more agile approach to evaluating your IT estate? Do you have the capacity to regularly audit your IT estate to ensure cloud investments are still working for you or that you aren’t devoting more resources than necessary to old or outdated apps that could be consolidated?
Evolving IT maturity levels
You can evolve your IT maturity using a digital platform conductor (DPC), something recognized in four Gartner hype cycles. Using a DPC you can:
- Enable continuous improvement with an agile approach to managing IT transformation and responding to change.
- Leverage a data-driven approach to automate predictable processes that proactively address organizational goals. For example, by getting an accurate, real-time view of your IT estate you can automate workflows to address hardware or software issues affecting user productivity, mitigate potential security risks, and identify ways to reduce costs (e.g., application rationalization).
- Reduce program risk and cost across all IT programs. Automate and orchestrate system and human workflows such as data collection and analysis, communications, scheduling, and program execution based on readiness criteria to eliminate inefficient processes and reduce risk.
- Leverage knowledge from previous programs to automate future processes so they are constantly enhanced as needs evolve.
Book a demo to understand how ReadyWorks, a DPC, will help you achieve IT maturity.
