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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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