Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I attended a session on assessing maturity in IT given by Susan Landry. She outlined their maturity model which covers eight different dimensions. The maturity model has familiar levels if you’ve looked at my work, CMMI, or COBIT. Level 1 is ad hoc, level 2 is repeatable, level 3 is defined, level 4 is quantitatively managed, and level 5 is optimizing. The eight assessment areas are:

1. Application Portfolio Management (APM)
2. Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
3. Staffing, Skills, and Sourcing
4. Financial Analysis and Budgets
5. Vendor Management
6. Management of Architecture
7. Software Process
8. Operations and Support

The most interesting part of the discussion, however, was a single slide that discussed the interdependencies between these areas. For each pair of areas, the relationship was classified as either highly interdependent or moderately interdependent. Having done a multi-dimensional maturity model before, a big challenge is in determining whether or not it makes sense to get scored high in one dimension or low in another. In my SOA maturity model, I typically found that when scores were two or more levels apart, it was probably going to cause some imbalance in the organization. If the scores were even or a single level apart, it was probably workable. What I didn’t do, however, was to explore those inter-relationships and see if that theory uniformly applied. While Gartner didn’t provide a lot of depth in the inter-relationships, they did at least make a statement regarding it which can provide a lot of assistance in determining how to interpret the scoring and what actions to take.