Why your company needs IT-Maturity assessment

What is an IT Maturity assessment exactly?

An IT Maturity assessment is here to provide a framework and structure for evaluating and tracking the progress of various fields within your company. Depending on the industry and other factors a range of domains can be chosen. Some examples for this are – organizational culture, Technology and Architecture, Methodology, Compliance and Security, Innovation Spaces, Service Orientation. Each area will then be evaluated and tracked based on the status of progress. Common progression for this is the following: Initial, Managed, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, Optimizing. Consequently, the intended improvements in the assessed areas are defined.

Mediocre vs Great IT Maturity assessment

Unfortunately, some of our costumers have reported bad experience with other IT Maturity assessment providers before finding our service. The reason being that online self-proclaimed experts often make promises that fall through in reality. This article is going to outline the deciding factors when it comes to differentiating between mediocre and great IT Maturity assessments including best practices when setting them up. With this, we hope to support your decision process in the field of IT Maturity.

First steps – Understand the motive

The first step in the process of IT Maturity assessment should always be to determine the specific motive for the implementation. For many of our costumers, this seems to be more of a challenge than anticipated beforehand, especially in bigger companies. The reason for this is that the motives can vary quite substantially within a business. Agreeing on what to focus on can be a challenging task.

Be specific and simple

Once the motives are clear, the next step is to define goals that align with them. For this, it’s very important to find the proper balance between simplification and completeness. In other words, a good set of assessment goals should be tailored to your vision while not being overly complicated.

Be realistic and start small

When starting with an IT Maturity assessment, it’s important to start small and avoid unrealistic expectations. We always advise our clients to take claims that promise immediate and drastic improvement with a grain of salt. The rate of adaptation when new systems are implemented greatly varies between businesses (and industries) and thus we strongly advise you to start small. A good way to do this is a pilot project. Of course, once the challenge of starting is overcome the project size can be gradually increased and the benefits of IT Maturity assessment will become more and more visible.

Going the extra mile

Once an IT maturity assessment system is implemented the real work just starts. Knowing the weaknesses and areas that shall be improved is the first step. The next (and equally important) step is to take action based on the learnings. This includes finding solutions to the assessed problems. This goes hand in hand with the awareness that an IT maturity assessment should never be viewed as a one time project but rather as an incremental process. In other words, to get the most out of an IT maturity assessment the assessed progress needs to be tracked continuously and goals must be adjusted accordingly.

Summary

To sum it up, a clear IT maturity assessment is a powerful (and essential) tool when it comes to staying on track with your companies vision. As with all business tools that may be called „game changers“ expertise, hard work, and perseverance are all essential for a proper implementation of IT maturity assessments.

About the company

At Iphos, we have set the industry bar to a new level by providing highly individualized IT maturity assessments. All our endeavors build around our costumers‘ needs in order to maximize their satisfaction. With a wide and extensive experience with IT maturity assessments, we are able to consult you with a domain-specific service. The following references and use cases that include some of our FORTUNE 500 Business partners may give you a better insight into our customer-orientated service.