Tag Archives: Supply Maturity

IT Pros – What Will Become of Them?


Ben Worthen had a great post last week in the WSJ Business Technology blog entitled “Tech Pros: The Next Dinosaurs?”  Ben cites Nucleus Research’s Rebecca Wettemann:

It’s the logical consequence of two interrelated trends: the average worker becoming more tech savvy, and tech companies realizing that appealing directly to workers is as – if not more – important than appealing to IT management… There was a time when IT departments could get away with forcing employees to use complicated and hard-to-use software. The average worker didn’t know that better alternatives were out there. But as workers gain experience with consumer-focused software – either in their personal lives or at the office – they’re starting to realize that software can be easy to use and quick to get started on. It started with productivity boosters like instant messaging and collaboration software, but it’s crept into the realm of software that’s traditionally the realm of IT departments, such as sales automation.

In the language of Business-IT maturity often cited on this blog, I find that business demand in general is maturing quickly, and IT supply, as defined in terms of the collective supply (hardware, software, services) is maturing alongside demand (perhaps just slightly ahead of demand).  However, if we consider IT supply through the lens of any particular IT organization as opposed to collectively, then to Ben Worthen’s and Rebecca Wettermann’s point, progress is not so rapid or so obvious at many IT organizations.  I’ve referenced before that some IT shops seem to be stuck in time warp – in an age of mainframe programming and big ERP application packages, of taking orders from business partners and delivering against those orders, no matter what the potential business value.  Innovation and collaboration are not seriously visible on their agendas, and notions of measuring business value of IT investments are as foreign as notions of flying saucers and apparitions.

It is the IT pros in these low maturity shops – especially those without a real ambition to drive up both business demand and IT supply maturity that I fear for.  They are becoming the dinosaurs.  They evolved in a time when you could get by with a fairly weak set of IT capabilities, and lay the blame on the business for “not getting it!”  I come across many such IT pros who are cruising along with an ‘entitlement’ mentality.  I have never been more convinced that their time is limited.  They will be the ones that will be outsourced, off-shored and ultimately, will have a hard time staying actively employed.

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So, What Comes After Level 3 Business-IT Maturity?


I had a question from a colleague recently that I’d like to address in this post.  She asked, “I’m going to ask a possibly ‘dumb’ question, but since I believe that there are no dumb questions I’m asking it anyway…  Since level 3 is constantly evolving i.e., today’s Level 3 will be tomorrow’s Level 2 etc., isn’t it always going to be a moving target?  If I was a company at Level 3 Business-IT Maturity, where IT and business act as one in strategy, planning and execution, and so on,  won’t you eventually fall to Level 2 if you don’t keep changing? How do leading edge companies do that?”

As she noted, there are no dumb questions, and this is actually a very smart question.  First, a reminder.  We recently updated the 3-level Business-IT Maturity Model to more clearly show that it is really made up of 3 separate ‘S’ shape, or ‘learning’ curves.

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The significance here is the discontinuities that occur between levels.  To simplify, Level 1 was about learning to leverage (business demand) and manage (IT supply) the universe of mainframe computing.  The big discontinuity that threw everyone was the entry of the Personal Computer, and the seismic shift to client-server computing.  So, Level 2 was the same as Level 1, but for client-server computing.  The seismic shift today is ultimately caused by the Internet as a computing platform, with all its consequences, including Service Oriented Architecture, Software (and Hardware) as a Service, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and so on.  Level 3, then, is about learning to leverage (business demand) and manage (IT supply) the universe of Internet computing. 

The fact that this is a discontinuity gives us choices about how, when and why we jump from the Level 2 curve to the Level 3 curve.  Some are jumping early, and for everything (e.g., Google, Amazon.com).  Some are jumping early for some things (e.g., ING Direct, but not ING), and most are not jumping at all at this time.

Back to my colleague’s question.  The way we are using the Business-IT Maturity Model, from the perspective of today, high Level 3 means we have mastered the new computing paradigm, both from a business demand and IT supply perspective.  There will have been such a confluence between what we today know as “business” and as “IT” that these things will be inextricably interwoven.  Some will say we are already at this point, but I beg to differ.  These things are deeply interdependent, but still most organizations have IT specialists (internal or external) who are responsible for “doing” most IT development and support work.  On the other hand, most “business” people are ‘users’ of IT but not ‘producers.’  I believe that by 2017, the focus of this blog, that situation will have changed dramatically, and most organizations will be well into the Level 3 space.  As she noted in her question, they will have to work at staying at at high Level 3 – entropy, anarchy and other forces are always working to undo the good work of management.

Note, the ‘S’ curves become asymptotic to the horizontal – but never become horizontal, so I could answer my colleague by saying, “There is no ‘after Level 3′ – just a long, slow, journey through it.”  Or, I could say, “There will be some other seismic shift, as yet unanticipated (at least by me!) and we will transition through another discontinuity.”

What I actually said was, “Level 3 does change over time – when everyone has reached Level 3, the model will no longer be valuable.  As an analogy, once you are an adult and stop growing, you tend not to obsess the way kids do about how many inches you’ve grown over a year.  The Business-IT Maturity Model will have outlived its usefulness, I will be retired and living on a Caribbean Island, and some other blogger will be all in a lather about some new maturity model!”  See, it was not a dumb question after all!

Reaching Level 3: The Mindset Factor


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I’ve posted before on the role of ambition as a key factor in driving business-IT maturity.  I want to move beyond that and pick up the theme of mindset.  This is a topic I covered in today’s teleconference as part of our multi-client research project into business-IT maturity.

According to Wikipedia, Mindset refers to the set of assumptions or methods held by groups of people which is so established that it creates a powerful incentive with these people to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices or tools.  i.e., it defines a mental ‘rut’ we all get stuck in.  Below are a few slides from today’s research WebEx meeting that examine the nature of business, IT and collective mindsets that tend to predominate Level 2 versus Level 3 business-IT maturity levels.  (This is hopefully useful to you – in the interests of full disclosure, this is also a test for me in that it’s the first time I’ve embedded a PowerPoint presentation into my blog – a trivial act for most of the blogosphere, but a breakthrough activity for me!)  Enjoy!

Podcast on Business-IT Maturity Model


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I’m very proud that Tom Parish, host and audio producer for the excellent Enterprise Leadership web site, invited me to deliver a podcast on the Business-IT Maturity model.  Just click on the blue link above my photo, or right-click to download the mp3 file.

It was a great deal of fun to do – Tom asked excellent questions, and we covered a lot of ground.  I refer to the Business-IT Maturity Model very frequently in this blog, so if you have a little time (30 minutes in total, but you can download it to your mp3 player, and make productive use of your commute time), please visit the site and listen to the podcast.

The “Unwritten Rules” of Business-IT Maturity – Part 2


Today I will expand upon the introduction in my last post to the topic of ‘unwritten rules’ as they pertain to Business-IT Maturity. 

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First a reminder – the Business-IT Maturity model I’ve discussed from various angles since starting this blog last October addresses ‘two sides of the coin’, those being Business Demand maturity(the business appetite for IT enablement) and IT Supply maturity(the ability to satisfy that demand in a safe, secure, predictable, efficient and effective manner.  There are unwritten rules that impact the supply side (I provided some examples in the previous post), and others that impact the demand side.  Given the interdependencies between IT demand and supply, rules on either side that drive dysfunctional behavior frequently impact the other side – often in a vicious cycle.  For example, “IT is a necessary overhead cost to be minimized” is a very common demand side ’unwritten rule’ that dramatically limits IT performance and business value.  You can imagine an environment that behaves according to such a rule, compared with one where the rule is, “IT is a business investment to be leveraged, that can provide significant opportunities for competitive advantage.”

Of course, the reality is that IT is both a cost to be minimized, and an investment to be leveraged, and a good IT portfolio classification scheme helps differentiate these, and strong IT portfolio management models and governance practices reinforce the desired behaviors around each investment class.  However, if an unwritten rule is predominantly “IT is a cost to be minimized,” it is unlikely that business executives will invest their time and energy in implementing and sustaining the kinds of IT portfolio management and governance that will create real business value.  i.e., the ‘unwritten rule’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and IT leaders must find a way to break the unwritten rule and replace it with something more productive.

Another unwritten rule common to Business Demand is, “Big systems development initiatives such as ERP implementations are IT projects.”  Today, most enterprises have learned the lessons around this rule, and any seasoned CIO will push back and not collude with such behaviors.  There is also a common unwritten rule on the supply side, “We accept any and all IT requests from the business.”  You can imagine (and have probably seen) the kinds of value-limiting activities and behaviors created by this type of unwritten rule.  You can also begin to see the kinds of systemic behaviors and vicious cycles that surface from these unwritten rules.

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As you can see, the combination of the demand side rule, “IT is a cost to be minimized” (a typically Level 1 and low Level 2 Business-IT maturity rule) and the supply side, “All orders are good orders” (a typical Level 1 and low Level 2 rule) leads to low value activities being willingly worked by constrained supply resources, yielding low business value from IT investments, and stealing capacity away from potentially higher value opportunities.  These dynamics reinforce the sense that IT is a cost to be minimized.

Effective IT leaders must be able to surface and understand the unwritten rules that drive both IT demand and supply behaviors, and must create interventions (education and awareness building, changes to governance mechanisms, and so forth) to re-shape the unhealthy rules into ones that are value-accretive as opposed to value-limiting.  We will drill further into this topic in subsequent posts.

Business-IT Maturity and Change in Organizational Mission


As I’ve been researching human and organizational development for BSG Concours’s Reaching Level 3 multi-client research, I was reminded of the role of organizational “mission” as frequently expressed through some form of mission statement.   I’ve done a lot of work over the years (both research and consulting) on IT organizational change and transformation, much of which involved defining or refining organizational mission and organizational vision (with its corresponding vision statement.)

Often I have found that my role as consultant and facilitator of mission/vision development sessions is to elevate my client’s ambition – to focus them on a higher order (more mature) business demand, with the correspondingly higher order (more mature) IT supply capabilities.

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For example, a Level 1 IT organizational mission might be colloquially described as “keep the trains running on time and keep the lights on.”  This is an essentially ‘IT infrastructural” mission.  This is appropriate to Level 1 business demand – IT is seen as a necessary cost to be minimized, and as a bunch of techie types best kept as far out of the business as possible.  The business really wants a pure “utility” – like good children in Victorian times, best neither seen nor heard.  If we have to have email, it better run efficiently and with high availability.  If we are replacing clerical people with silicon to process transactions, they’d better run efficiently, accurately, consistently and reliably.  One important variation on this theme is the anticipation of Level 2, and indeed the stimulation of Level 2 business demand.  In other words, the Level 1 IT mission is to fully meet Level 1 business demand, and to elevate that demand beyond Level 1.

At Level 2, the IT organizational mission goes beyond simply running the trains and lights.  The Level 2 mission is more about business effectiveness – end-to-end business process solutions and enterprise systems.  Above and beyond IT infrastructure, Level 2 missions have a strong project and programcomponent – building new business capability.  At the risk of pushing the railway analogy way too far, the business ‘passengers’ want help planning their journeys; they want help creating new facilities to meet their customer needs they want more direct ways of getting to and from those facilities.  It’s no longer just about transportation, it’s about developing communities where people live and work, and helping transport them through those communities.  As with the Level 1 mission, our Level 2 mission must include not only meeting Level 2 demand, but also elevating that demand.

At Level 3, the IT organizational mission expands to activities focused on business innovation and growth.  If Level 1 was about the trains and utilities, and Level 2 was about creating new towns and cities, Level 3 is about exploring new frontiers – “outfitting” our business partners, their customers and suppliers to collaboratively find new places to live, and better ways to live and work in their current places.

Analogies aside, I believe that the IT organizational mission looks very different at Level 1, 2 and 3.  Regardless of how many developmental stages you want to consider, look at your IT organizational mission – when was it last changed?  How appropriate is it to meeting today’s business agenda?  To what degree does it shape tomorrow’s business agenda?  How is your mission being actualized? 

This last point brings us to IT organizational vision, which I leave for a future post.

Business-IT Maturity and Human Development Archetypes


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My post yesterday suggested that human development might be a useful metaphor for Business-IT Maturity.  In particular, we might imagine the parallels between physical, cognitive, social and economic development.  We might apply these developmental dimensions to both business maturity with information technology, and to the maturity of the IT organization.  This gives us both the demand and supplysides of the system.  We can then build a granular, multi-dimensional tool to help assess where an enterprise is in terms of current maturity, stated ambition, and trajectory, and similarly for the IT organization that supports that enterprise.  Hopefully such a tool will be helpful in diagnosing a given organizational setting, chosing a maturity roadmap, and accelerating the maturity journey.

While recognizing the risks of pushing any metaphor too far, I think the human development analogy has merit for many reasons.  Humans develop along the four dimensions quite differently – some develop physically quickly, others develop social skills quickly, while still others develop cognitive skills ahead of their peers, and so on.  What happens, for example, when a human is very mature physically, but socially inept and low on cognitive reasoning ability?

Following this line of thought, in this post I want to introduce another device – archetypes.   Again, I will acknowledge the risks when archetypes become stereotypes, but let’s set those aside for now.   Imagine the archetype of the “gangly teenager,” all arms and legs (physical development), but uncoordinated, socially inept and not terribly bright.  Imagine the IT organizational equivalent of the “gangly teenager.”  Perhaps such an organization would have mature physical networking capability, but poor business-IT strategic alignment, and low innovation capabilities.  Imagine the archetype of the “child prodigy,” with high cognitive maturity relative to physical, social and economic maturity – what would the analogous IT organization look like?  Would it have a capability to generate ideas and innovations, but be challenged in sustaining these opportunities due to poor IT infrastructure capabilities?  Imagine the “precocious child,” socially extroverted, but lacking in physical and cognitive maturity – what would the analogous business look like?

I think there may be value in using archetypes for better understanding business-IT maturity, and will continue working down this path – I’d love to hear from you with any suggestions or ideas to help with this thinking.

Human Development as a Metaphor for Business-IT Maturity


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As part of the “Reaching Level 3″ Business-IT maturity research project I’m currently involved in, I’ve been thinking about human metaphors to see if these add any insight or richness that help us better understand how IT organizations (and the businesses they support) mature, how to assess maturity, and how to safely accelerate the maturation process.

Humans develop along four dimensions: Physical, Cognitive, Social and Economic.  Human developmental research says that while there are timing differences among individuals, by and large, the stages of development and sequence are universal and generalizable.  There is a hierarchical nature to these development stages, with each successive stage incorporating elements of the previous stage, but with increased differentiation and integration.  I think these four dimensions can usefully be applied to business-IT maturity.  As ever, I believe we need to consider maturity of the IT organization as ‘one side of the coin’, and the maturity of a businesses use of IT as the ‘other side of the coin’.  While these two sides are mutually dependent, they are distinct and need to be assessed separately.

Physical Development manifests itself in humans first as an ability to control movement, then to communicate, then to procreate, and ultimately to respond to threats and opportunities in the environment.  It is easy to imagine the analogies such as the ability to run IT infrastructure, ability to implement business systems, ability to align business and IT goals, ability to evolve supply with changing demand, and, consistent with the notion of procreation, the ability of an IT organization to foster IT capabilities in the business it serves (teach them to fish, rather than fish for them).

Cognitive Development manifests itself in humans first with reflexes, then with habits, then with ability to coordinate activities, and finally with insight and creativity.  All sorts of analogies are imaginable, including ’order taking’ as a reflex behavior of immature IT organizations, rigorous use of business cases is a positive ‘habit’ that demonstrates higher maturity, portfolio management allows higher order coordination of decision making and resource allocation, business analytics and innovative design thinking are even higher order cognitive activities.

Social Development encompasses the development of social institutions, social structures, and social relations.  The analogies here include social institutions such as business-IT governance bodies and enterprise architecture boards, social structures such as innovation networks, communities of practice.  Social relations could include interpersonal relationships between members of the IT organization and members of the business they support, or of the customer or supplier communities the business depends upon.

Economic Development encompasses economic efficiency and effectiveness, access to capital, output (GDP) and sustainability.  The analogies here include transaction processing costs, costs of building and running business solutions, access to IT funding, and the degree to which IT business practices are sustainable (e.g, I’ve argued before that simply adding new “stuff” to the IT portfolio without ever retiring old “stuff” is not sustainable.)

I’d be interested to hear from people their reactions to this line of thinking, and if it might form the basis for a multi-dimensional Business-IT Maturity assessment instrument.

New Multi-client Research Program


I’m very excited!  At the end of this week I’m participating in a new multi-cient “future leading practices” research initiative:  Project: RLT – Reaching Level 3 Business-IT Capability.

From time to time I’d like to raise questions on this blog that I think are fundamental to improving IT capability in general, but also more specifically to accelerating the journey through the business-IT maturity curve.  I’m especially interested in the “sticking points” people experience on the journey – many of them found at the the middle of Level 2.

This blog is not intended in any way to represent the BSG Alliance Research Team, Project Participating Companies or the Research Program – it represents my personal views, and hopefully, will generate some interesting heat and perhaps a little light on how to keep enterprise IT capability up with or even ahead of demand.

Question for today:

Let’s consider supply maturity – what are you finding as “sticking points” where it feels like you are bogged down in Level 1 or Level 2 IT supply maturity? 

I’m going to be taking the research participants through a member roundtable on this question on Friday, so any thoughts prior to then will be input to the process.

We’ll look at demand-side maturity questions tomorrow.