Increasing Maturity by Reducing Complexity

There are characteristics of Level 1 and low Level 2 Business-IT Maturity that allow (cause?) the IT environment to become overly complex, and with that complexity comes high cost and low agility.  This complexity is a killer sticking point for getting to higher maturity. 
Let’s first try to understand what it is about the lower maturity [...]

The Business Case as a Value Realization Tool

I want to pick up on the previous post about shifting from a supply constrained to a value constrained business IT model.  I think this shift in paradigm about the IT resource is one of the most critical for getting out of Level 2 and into Level 3 Business-IT Maturity.
In the lower stages of Business-IT [...]

From ‘Supply Constrained’ to ‘Value Constrained’ Business-IT Model

One of the difficult paradigm shifts that tends to trap IT organizations in Level 2 Business-IT Maturity is the notion that business demand must be constrained by IT supply.  Demand always exceeds supply for IT capacity, so the idea (part of the Level 1 experience) is to set a limit on IT supply, then figure [...]

IT Funding and the “Stealth Infrastructure” Trap

Another common sticking point that shows up in IT funding approaches in Level 2is the “stealth infrastructure” trap.  The logic (or illogic!) behind this is, “The business does not understand all this infrastructure stuff (or plug in your enterprise-wide IT improvement initiative du jour - e.g., SOA, Enterprise Architecture) so we will squirrel away funds [...]

IT Funding and the Level 2 Sticking Point

One of the more intractable sticking points on the journey to Level 3 Business-IT Maturity is in the IT funding model - the ways that IT prices its products and services, and recovers its costs (and, it a profit center, covers its margin).
Life as a consultant is tough.  I’m not complaining, but we have to [...]

Language and Business-IT Maturity

Language has some interesting relationships to Business-IT Maturity.  As a management consultant, one of the things I have to do is quickly calibrate a client’s situation - sometimes, in just minutes (e.g., with a new, or potential client).  I’ve had some version of the Business-IT Maturity model in the back of my head for many [...]

IT Maturity and the Role of Relationship Management

I’ve noted before that Level 1 in the Business-IT Maturity Model is mostly about Supply Management (managing the provisioning of IT products and services for consumption by the business or its customers/consumers), and that Level 3 is mostly about Demand Management (shaping and surfacing the demand for IT products and services from the business and [...]

IT Leadership and the Level 2 Sticking Point

I want to address a controversial aspect of IT Leadership, and why I see it being a relatively common contributor to why IT organizations get stuck in the middle of Level 2 Business-IT Maturity.
Many years ago, while leading a multi-year longitudinal study of IT organizational transformations, the research team hypothesized that the leadership style and [...]

IT Improvement vs. Breakthrough

I want to explore another aspect of the Business-IT Maturity mid-Level 2 sticking point.  As a client said to me last week in a variation on an old chestnut, “You can’t improve yourself into Level 3.”  I think it was Joseph Juran in the early 1960’s who really had this figured out.  In his groundbreaking [...]

Project vs. Program vs. Portfolio Management

I mentioned in the last post the shift from project management to program management as one of the many important shifts in business-IT maturity that typically take place around the middle of Level 2 (in a simplified 3-level model).  I want to explore that in greater detail in this post, and connect it to Portfolio [...]