Forget Maturity Models?

 
A colleague just pointed me to a ZapThink post last month entitled Forget Maturity Models−It’s time for an agility model.  It turns out the types of maturity model ZapThink would like us to forget are CMMI and any SOA maturity model.  They don’t specifically call out the Business-IT Maturity Model that has been a recurring [...]

Improve or Innovate?

My last couple of posts have been on ITIL, where I presented my argument that approaches such as this (and CMMI) are necessary but not sufficient to take Business-IT Maturity to the next level.  They are necessary because they help build a solid foundation for IT operations and services.  They are insufficient because they typically [...]

Why ITIL is “Necessary but not sufficient”

My post yesterday claimed that ITIL is necessary, but not sufficient for reaching Level 3 Business-IT Maturity.  As anticipated, this has led to a fair amount of traffic, some showing up as commentary on the blog, others showing up as email messages from various vendors of Service Management and ITIL support services.  I therefore want [...]

When IT is Your business - Not Just a Support Function

I’ve acknowledged previously that companies where IT essentially isthe business (think Amazon, Google, et al) mature very differently than do IT organizations that are essentially supportfunctions (think most traditional businesses, even most financial services companies that are highly information intensive).  We’ve seen this in our SOA research - and this was a pattern I saw in my [...]

Business-IT Maturity and the Portfolio Lens

I was with a client recently as their CIO was leading one of their regular “town hall” meetings (live meeting for those in HQ, videoconference for those elsewhere).  He was talking (eloquently!) about Next Generation Enterprises, Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for their company and for their IT / shared services organization.
A question from the [...]

More on the Sticking Point

As I get ready for a week’s vacation in Aruba (lots of Scuba diving and time with my family!) I want to explore a couple of more aspects of the “sticking point” that I see IT shops bogging down in as they mature from Level 1 business-IT maturity towards Level 3.  The sticking point is [...]

The “Level 2″ Sticking Point

I believe that the major inflexion point comes at the middle of Level 2.  The things you have to do to get from Level 1 to Level 2 are quite different from the things you must do to get from Level 2 to Level 3.  The Business-IT Maturity model is a learning curve and the middle [...]

Business-IT Maturity - a helpful lens for the future?

The Next Generation Enterprise (NGE) is highly (totally?) dependent upon IT.  A rich and robust infrastructure, user friendly tools, on demand web services, on demand processing capacity and storage space are merely table stakes for tapping the next generation of collaborative, social networking, and marketing capabilities.  IT organizations need to partner with business units and [...]