Even excellent Chief Information Officers should from time to time lean back and take a look from the distance at their IT organization to understand how developed and mature the organization is.
Maturity Assessments are no rocket science and there are various capability and maturity models available in the market. e.g. for projects, services, processes and organizations. I have made very good practical experiences with the following maturity model provided by an older version of the COBIT framework (COBIT = Control Objectives for Information and related Technology).
This COBIT maturity model differentiates between six maturity levels, which are logical and easy to understand: 0. non-existent, 1. initial/adhoc, 2. repeatable but intuitive, 3. defined, 4. managed and measurable and 5. optimized,
A small team of experienced IT professionals is able to determine the maturity even of larger IT organizations including identification of concrete improvement potentials with manageable effort in a comparably short time span, by combining the aforementioned maturity levels with the right set of questions.
The questions should systematically cover all mission critical IT processes of the IT organization, such as:
- IT/Business Alignment
- IT Demand Management
- IT Portfolio Management
- IT Strategy Management
- IT Innovation Management
- IT Architecture Management
- IT Project&Program Management
- IT Service Management
- IT Risk Management
- Planning and Controlling
- Internal Control System
- People Management
- Performance Management
- …
The 37 COBIT processes structured into 5 domain can be utilized as basis for identifying the mission critical IT processes of your IT organization:
The results of the maturity assessment can be visualized e.g. in form of a spider diagram and provide an excellent basis for directed improvement or optimization of the IT organization.
KuBra Consult 