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THE 7 ATTRIBUTES OF HIGH-PERFORMING IT SERVICE ORGANISATIONS
For this month’ s Intelligent Government section, we take a sample from an Axios Systems research paper, which outlines service excellence and the IT maturity manifesto roadmap.
IT maturity is something that business and IT leaders aspire to have but is difficult to define. So what is IT maturity? The meaning is highly subjective, varying within a single organization, across industries, business models, company sizes and stages of corporate evolution. Startups tend to have a lightweight IT infrastructure and are too fluid to be concerned with concepts like IT maturity. Larger organizations with sizeable IT estates are more acutely aware of the importance and commit to regular benchmarking against their peers.
In a world where products and services are continually disrupted and redefined by emerging technologies, the only certainty is that every organization will eventually hit their own“ peak IT” – the point at which the complexity of the IT estate, and an unprecedented volume and velocity of demands coming from the business – are overpowering the capacity of the IT function, preventing forward motion and forcing a transformation in order to step up capabilities to meet the rigors of the digital age. The symptoms of this sticking point are all too familiar to today’ s IT departments:
• Constant firefighting of the same infrastructure and application issues ties up IT resources
• The IT project portfolio is heavily stacked towards infrastructure improvements
• Infrastructure changes trigger service disruption
• High turnover of service desk and support staff
• Combative interactions with business people
• Short-term objectives continually overshadow long term strategies
• IT projects never complete in time and business opportunities are missed
• When IT projects do run to
Research 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- beyond the sticking point – and the top 10 % average of 3.37( 2015) shows that breaking through the barrier to the upper echelons of the maturity scale is possible. 1 It is these high performing IT organizations that enable businesses to grow and lead in the digital era. They illustrate
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