IT CMF study shows highest it maturity in high-tech companies, lower in pharma, utilities

After more than 60,000 man hours of development and over $10 million in investment, IT-CMF version 1.0 is now fully operational for companies to assess their IT management maturity, leading to significant savings and efficiencies, the annual European Conference of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) heard today, at NUI Maynooth, Ireland.

Data from latest industry analysis of 150 IT-CMF assessments across 80 leading Fortune 500 companies shows that the average maturity levels for all companies in all 32 Critical Processes is quite low at around 2.1 out of a possible 5. The highest scores are in the high-tech sector, at an average level of 2.5, while the pharmaceutical sector scored lowest at an average 1.9. Financial services scored 2.2, utilities averaged 2.0, while other companies and organisations scored an average of 2.1.

Commenting on the study, Ralf Dreischmeier, IVI Director and Partner and Managing Director of The Boston Consulting Group said that when companies initially self-assessed according to IVI high-level frameworks their own scores averaged around 3.0:

"There is something of a gap between organisations’ own sense of their maturity and the reality. The IT-CMF identifies these gaps and lays out a road-map for capability improvement. What we have also found, interestingly, is that CIOs often rate their maturity levels a full point higher on the scale than IT leaders further down their IT organisation".

IVI also announced the establishment of an international Masters degree and professional diploma courses, tailored for CIOs and senior IT executives to align IT with business strategy, improve business performance and ensure the CIO’s position at the boardroom table. IVI has already trained over 300 CIOs and senior IT executives from more than 20 countries, over the past three years.

Initiated as a joint venture between Intel, NUI Maynooth and The Boston Consulting Group, IVI now has over 55 blue-chip patron members engaged on its development, including Ernst & Young, Microsoft and BP as well as new members Cisco and the US Air Force. Companies with which it has recently engaged include Deutsche Post, State Street, SAP and one of Ireland’s largest public sector institutions, Beaumont Hospital. IVI was named a Centre of Excellence by the Irish Government in 2009.

Among the news and results outlined at the Conference were:

Chevron announced it had adopted the IT-CMF as unifying framework across all of its global IT operations, from exploration to distribution and sales.
IVI also announced that the world’s leading oil and gas companies are using the IT-CMF in an integrated benchmarking study covering their entire enterprise IT. The IT-CMF assessment is being carried out by IVI steering patron The Boston Consulting Group
The establishment of IVI accredited professional qualifications through NUI Maynooth in Europe and Bentley University in the US, providing senior management qualifications to CIOs. These include an MBA-style Masters in IT for Business Value degree programme on the business alignment of IT investments and a range of Professional Diplomas for executives to improve their own organisation’s IT investment decisions.
Within the IT-CMF assessments, there is a wide dispersion of maturity in IT investment management, with a low overall average score of 2.4, but leading organisations prioritising this area and demonstrating the highest maturity scores yet seen.
IVI assessments also reveal key skills and capability gaps preventing the realisation of business value from IT:
- Architects with deep technical skills but lacking the business analysis and communication skills to make a compelling case for the architecture simplification that would bring down IT costs.
- High maturity around IT investment approval being undermined by weak tracking of benefits delivery.

Speaking at the Conference IVI founder and Intel Global Director of IT Innovation Professor Martin Curley said the IT-CMF was now fully mature and its application and potential was being better understood by industry.

"The financial turmoil of the past 18 months has underlined the pressing need for the IT function of an organisation to be able to account for itself. No-one can justify large costs without an idea of return. While IT is obviously vital to the functioning of a modern organisation, through IT-CMF we can now help companies quantify the contribution it makes in real cash terms, and better plan to identify savings and Return on Investment. This works equally well for Fortune 500 companies as well as for public sector organisations."

NUI Maynooth President, Professor John Hughes said the introduction of IT-focused postgraduate business qualifications would greatly empower the role of the CIO:

"We can now offer organisations international qualifications, from professional diplomas to Masters in IT Management, in this nascent area of IT accountability. This is extremely exciting for CIOs as it will provide them with specific postgraduate managerial training, focused on their roles and skill sets to allow them take their place at the boardroom table. The delivery of these programmes, on-line and through NUI Maynooth and Bentley University (Boston MA, USA), will be unique to the market. Over the coming months we anticipate rolling these courses out to 20 universities worldwide."

Commenting on the collaborative work of the leading energy companies, Andrew Agerbak, Chair of the IVI management team and Principal at The Boston Consulting Group said IVI firmly believed business competitors could share and learn in solving common IT challenges:

"IVI has been constructed as an international open forum learning consortium. To date, that learning has been largely achieved across industry sectors, but this collaboration, amongst a number of leading companies within the oil and gas sector demonstrates a particularly powerful application of the IT-CMF. The value of the IT-CMF is dramatically increased when companies of this scale, with very particular but similar IT challenges benchmark with each other and pool their learnings to recognise and drive IT value."

The oil companies' IT capability maturity was assessed across six dimensions of the IT-CMF – Innovation; Benefits Assessment and Realisation; Sourcing; Strategic Planning; Organisation Design and Planning; and Leadership and Governance. The benchmarking study will continue throughout 2010 with results currently being presented to CIOs.

Cisco Europe CIO, Robbert Kuppens said:

"Cisco is very interested in using the IT-CMF to carry out an in-depth assessment of our IT operating model and capabilities. Of particular value is the ability to benchmark, identify gaps and use the assessment to prioritise future IT investment to enable Cisco's growth, innovation and customer experience."

Beaumont Hospital CIO Martin McCormack said the IT-CMF provided public sector organisations the framework to ensure their IT investment decisions remained best in class:

"It is impossible to overstate the importance of good IT investment for the public sector, particularly in healthcare. By being involved with the IVI we are benchmarking our practice against industry best practice. The IT-CMF assessments on Project Management and Portfolio Planning Processes give us a very accurate picture of exactly where we stand right now against best practice. The roadmap that IVI provides will allow us innovate with confidence, assign budgets to those projects that deliver best value for patients and staff and drive to improve in a fast, structured way."

IVI is headquartered at NUI Maynooth. There are 120 IT practitioners and researchers from its 40 global member companies divided into 15 working groups providing services to client organisations and engaged in ongoing research and development of the IT-CMF on a year-round basis.

Further information from:

NUI Maynooth
Deirdre Watters                       +353 1 86 803 5274

Gibney Communications            +353 1 661 0402
Donnchadh O’Neill                   +353 87 205 6504

Notes to Editor
About the Innovation Value Institute (IVI)
IVI was co-founded by NUI Maynooth, Intel and The Boston Consulting Group in 2006 and is made up of a strong consortium of leading industry players and academia. IVI’s mission is to create the global standard to realise the business value from IT investments. The key areas of focus are the developments of frameworks, such as the IT-CMF, to improve IT effectiveness as well as providing continuous professional development. To date over 250 IT Professionals from 20 countries have interacted with the IT-CMF. IVI is also working towards creating the global accreditation standard for IT management.

About the IT-CMF (Capability Maturity Framework)
The IT-CMF is a framework to evaluate an organization’s IT maturity level, benchmark with industry peers and best practice, and identify a roadmap for improvement. It has been developed by practitioners and academics in real time, and tested in the real world at every stage. See attached document for further information.

For more information please visit http://ivi.nuim.ie/

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