Over a long period of time we were receiving demand from different customers and stakeholders requesting our help with analyzing actual levels of IT management practices in their companies and to provide an external, objective look at IT, compare it with other organizations and develop a management summary of our overall findings. While this seems like a straight forward request and is covered by many consulting service providers, we struggled to develop answers to some very simple questions which are crucial to the different management levels from CEO level to IT professionals delivering operational support to the end user.
Key questions we were requested to answer:
_ How good is our IT?
_ How is the quality of our IT evolving?
_ How do we compare with other IT departments in similar organizations?
_ How do we align the perception of quality between the business and IT?
_ Can you compare the quality and costs of our IT?
There are many existing assessment approaches based on ISO/IEC, capability models, maturity models, structured surveys as well as there being many different benchmarking approaches that provide detailed analytical outputs. These are typically focused and targeted internally, providing largely internal benefits to a company’s IT organization, looking mostly at the presence of documentation and processes, but none of them providing a comprehensive and straight forward answer to address the simple yet fundamental question asked by management – HOW GOOD IS OUR IT?
We believe that a simple question should have a simple answer.