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How three organisations are using the IT Capability Maturity Framework to maximise the value of information technology

A seminary founded in 1795 is perhaps an unlikely venue for high-level discussions of the value of information technology in business. But in June 2011 a number of CIOs, IT directors and industry executives descended on St Patrick’s College in Maynooth, the last major university for priests in Ireland, for just that.

The reason is that Maynooth is also home to the Innovation Value Institute (IVI), a division of the National University of Ireland that researches IT management in business. And the location is not really so unusual – both Intel and Hewlett-Packard have research facilities nearby, attracted by the supply of mathematics graduates from NUI Maynooth.

The IVI’s main contribution so far has been the IT Capability Maturity Framework, a set of capability definitions, assessments and benchmarks designed to allow organisations to articulate and enhance the value that IT contributes to business. The framework splits that challenge into four broad capabilities – Managing IT for business value; Managing the IT budget; Managing IT like a business; and Managing the IT capability. Each of these comprises a number of critical processes, such as innovation management or benefits realisation.

IT-CMF provides an assessment that allows organisations to find out how good their processes are, and therefore the maturity of their capabilities. It also allows them to benchmark their investment in these processes against others organisations.

Even among the assembled IT-CMF adopters at Maynooth, there was an acknowledgment that the framework is just the latest in a long line of initiatives that have promised to resolve the perennial issue of aligning IT to the business. There was also talk of the dangers of ‘framework fatigue’, when the initial excitement about a particular framework gives way to a feeling of being trapped in a set of management guidelines that no longer make sense.

But IVI argues that IT-CMF is different. It says it is the first to focus directly on business value. And because it has been developed in academia, it is not tied to the agenda of any particular management consultancy.

The organisation does have close links to nearby Intel – one of its directors, Professor Martin Curley, is also chairman of Intel Labs Europe. Curley explains that the motivation for Intel’s involvement in IT-CMF is to help organisations get better value from IT, which should in turn lead to more IT investment.

Three examples of IT-CMF in action are presented here, from three very different organisations, although all from the framework’s native Ireland. In each case, the CIO praised the framework’s ability to tackle one of the perennial challenges in IT management – articulating IT’s contribution to the business.

Central Bank of Ireland

Gerry Quinn was in no hurry to learn yet another IT management framework when he was appointed chief information officer of the Central Bank of Ireland last year.

“I’ve lived through many different methodologies and frameworks,” explains the former CIO of Ireland’s national telco, Eircom. “I never recovered from the ‘case engineering toolset’ of the mid-90s.”

However, the bank’s business agenda is changing rapidly. The Central Bank is also Ireland’s financial services regulator, and since the credit crunch the regulatory division has become more integrated. Meanwhile, the organisation has grown in size and profile.

“All this has generated a whole new set of requirements of the bank’s IT department,” explains Quinn. “The expectations for speed, efficiency, business process engineering and information management have all increased.”

To connect the IT department to the bank’s rapidly evolving agenda, Quinn devised a new mission for the department: to generate demonstrable organisational value through business process improvement. “We wanted to try and reposition the IT department away from being a technology factory, towards adding value to the organisation.”

Quinn felt that this change needed to be driven from within the organisation. “I could have brought in a consulting company with its own methodologies, but then it would have become that company’s agenda,” he explains. “You can disenfranchise people when you bring in consultants.”

Instead, he adopted the IT-CMF, which is independent from any particular consulting firm. “It gave us a framework to drive the agenda ourselves, which is a big advantage.”

By defining certain IT management capabilities, and assessing the maturity of the organisation through staff questionnaires, the framework defines a common vocabulary between IT and the business, Quinn argues. “It means you can talk to business colleagues in rational terms about processes, about capabilities and about differences in the way that IT and the business behave,” he says.

Quinn is currently in the process of moving the IT organisation away from a purely functional hierarchy – in which employees are organised in functional silos – towards a matrix structure, where workers may report to project managers or functional managers, or both.

“In functional organisations, ownership [of processes] tends to gets forced upwards: no-one owns the processes at a low level,” he says. “My hope is that I can push ownership of service management, for example, down through the organisation.”

Again, IT-CMF is helping in this regard. “The framework allows us to talk about processes that tie components of the matrix [structure] together,” says Quinn.

Quinn believes it is IT-CMF’s independence, both from the internal IT organisation and from external consulting partners, that allows it to become a shared vocabulary for both IT and business.

“I’m not trying to impose my personal view of IT; I’m saying, ‘Here’s an industry framework, it is not proprietary to any consulting business,’” he explains. “That gives it the credibility to engage both IT and the business.”

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