How to gauge the maturity of your IT operating model?

Like most things that are changing and challenging our way of living, the accelerating change in unfamiliar customer behaviors disrupted supply chains, and diverse regional responses are challenging the traditional IT practices.

To address these adverse circumstances that are stressing current operating models, companies must envision and execute new experiences, and digitally express their brand values to customers and employees by meeting their needs at relevant points of engagement.

How? You may ask.

Well, thanks to the recently published High-Performing IT Operating Model Assessment Report by Forrester, IT leaders such as yourself can leverage this report to understand the broader context of your current model and how well it’s performing relative to your peers. Get your copy here.

Riding on the insights from the recently published Forrester report, we’ve laid out a 3-level maturity analysis to help determine your IT organization’s overall operating model maturity. Read away.

Level 1: Beginner

Beginner organizations are split further into two categories: growing organizations that are still ad hoc in many key practices and mature organizations that still base their operating model on rigid practices of years past. 

  1. Know your customer. Customer focus is essential to progress in maturity in this assessment. Ask yourself if you have an end-to-end view of how value is delivered to any customer, including the flow of innovation to them and daily transactional delivery.
  2. Learn agile’s lessons. Increasingly, everything is a product, so start managing them, along with services. Products are the overall investment vehicle; services are the value propositions they provide. Start tracking a formal inventory as you scale into a team of teams.
  3. Think now about the interaction patterns you’re setting up. As teams start to interact, they carve out the digital equivalent of cow paths. At a beginner level, you need to think more systematically about how they should coordinate and what channels and processes you need to implement.

Level 2: Intermediate

Intermediate organizations are again split into two categories: growing, digital-native organizations that are struggling with emergent coordination and governance issues as they scale, and traditional organizations that have started a digital or agile transformation but cannot seem to scale it up or extend it beyond a few pilot teams, due to process and technical debt. 

  1. Take your customer obsession to the next level. Do you systematically train all your product teams and service managers in customer-focused practices? Do you have an organizational concept, consistently applied and reinforced, as to what it means to be customer-focused? Have you started building out a service catalog?
  2. Ensure that you have a complete service catalog. Now is the time to ensure that you have a complete service catalog, including a clear process for keeping it evergreen. Your service catalog should not just be a passive list but should also operationalize access to the services via common workflows that can be measured and managed.
  3. Question your default organizational assumptions. If you’re a traditional organization struggling to transform: Are you fully aware of the spectrum of organizational possibilities? They range from unbundled and specialist to cross-functional and matrixed across various sourcing options. Do you have a deliberate strategy for an adaptive, flexible mix?

Level 3: Advanced

Advanced organizations navigate the challenging waters of transformation and agility while establishing or preserving sound coordination and governance practices. They think objectively and clinically about hard operating-model questions and use quantified, experimental approaches to determine best-fit practices. They use a wide variety of operating tools and techniques, adapting them appropriately and with agility to the customers’ needs. 

  1. Beyond the basics of risk and compliance, automate and delegate downward as much as possible. Check if you are automating governance as much as possible, and framing it in terms of desired outcomes (“what”) rather than endless checklists (“how”).
  2. Continuously improve the customer experience through a relentless focus on their journeys and interactions. Promote an organization-wide method for continuous improvement, including monitoring lead times and satisfaction and improving responsiveness through both automating and becoming higher touch.
  3. At this level, automation is never done. You’ll continue to automate the easy things, and your people will increasingly handle harder and more variable work, which they will begin to understand and make routine, and the cycle will begin again. 

To determine the strengths and weaknesses in your current IT operating model and identify what must evolve for higher performance levels, use Forrester’s assessment to gauge the maturity of your IT operating model. Click here to get your copy of Forrester’s High-Performing IT Operating Model Assessment Report. 

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