We all know IT is a complex business, and is only getting more complex. In this is sort of climate how do you establish best practices to ensure the IT is run optimally and is demonstrating value to the business. IT CMF could be the answer, and to tell us more about it, we caught up with one of its proponents. In the first of a series of regular interviews IT Galaxy talks to Martin Curley, Intel’s Global Director of IT innovation and research, to tell us more. Below are the highlights, and we’ll try and make the full audio available soon.
Can you explain what the IT CMF is and what problem it addresses?
Sure. IT CMF stands for Capability Maturity Framework. It has a very simple focus, although it’s focused on solving a very complex problem. We are trying to create a single, CIO-level tool or playbook that can help the CIO navigate all the many challenges the CIO faces while at the same time improving IT capability and ultimately the value contribution from IT to the business. There’s been a systemic problem around the creation of actually demonstrating the value of what IT investments deliver while also there is a significant history of failures of IT investment. What we want to do by introducing this is help CIOs improve their capability and ultimately improve the predictability, the probability, and the profitability of their IT investments.
What does the framework actually look like, and how is it structured?
In version 1.0 of the IT CMF there are what we call 4 “macro processes”, and underneath those 4 macro processes there are 36 critical processes. You could say that through these 36 critical processes, we’re trying to create a periodic table of the atomic level of the business processes that the CIO needs to manage. At the highest level , the macro processes are: managing IT like a business, managing the IT budget, managing the IT capability, and managing IT for business value. These are essentially arranged in a control loop where budget is your input, managing the IT capability is the IT factory or engine, value is the output, and where we talk about managing IT like a business, here’s where all the strategy, and leadership and governance and a lot of other activities occur. So: 4 macro processes underpinned by 36 critical processes and for each of these processes we’re identifying 5 levels of maturity. Level 1 is “state-of-the-Ark” and level 5 is “state-of-the-art”. The whole hypotheses is that CIOs can improve the maturity of their processes and as they do they’re able to create more value. We have some empirical evidence and some validation of this in practice.
You mentioned partners; who actually created the framework with you?
The framework was initially developed at Intel by myself and a small team, and we used it to drive a transformation of Intel’s IT organisation. Now we have almost 40 partners. We have 6 different communities involved: the technology ecosystem; enterprise end-users; public sector end-users; the analyst community; CIO associations, and of course academics. Some of the more well-known players that are working with us would be Ernst and Young, SAP, Microsoft BP, and , AXA Insurance. Everybody has recognised that even though technology is moving ahead very fast, the management practices that we use to manage the new technology products have lagged, and that this problem was bigger than any one company, or any one university could solve.
And what do you think is going to be the near-term future of IT CMF, where do you think the next developments are going to be, and who’s going to take it up?
We expect by middle of next year that the full IT CMF version 1 will be released, but we’re also working on a sustainable computing capability maturity framework and we have an internal release process , and the sustainable IT CMF has already achieved a level 2 (and we hope to be at level 3 in September. That means that we actually have a full suite of tools that we can then go pilot with some of the member organisations.