Facilitating a NIMM Self Assessment

Diagnose BEFORE you Prescribe

The ultimate goal of the NIMM self assessment process is to get a common consensus on how things really are today. The people involved in self assessing (the target team) will start to form opinions individually and then as a team about what the current NIMM maturity level is, some will also start to think of how maturity can be improved.

It is recommended that someone lead the self assessment process, taking the role of a self assessment facilitator. This should be someone not directly involved in the capability being assessed, and ideally someone from the senior management team who will be a stakeholder in driving maturity improvement (the CIO should get involved in some of these self assessment sessions).

In summary, there are three phases of a self assessment:

1. Open questions — These questions allow the target team to talk openly and freely about their current capability and ways of working.

The advantage of these types of questions is that they pose no boundary for the first part of the self assessment; these kinds of questions should help the target team explore and probe how they currently do things from many different angles.

2. Control questions — With these questions, the facilitator starts to guide the self assessment towards a conclusion on the current NIMM maturity level. During this phase, ideas will start to surface on possible ways to improve maturity (write these down!).

3. Confirmation questions — These questions aim to establish agreement or consensus amongst the target team on the current NIMM maturity level along with ideas for initiatives that will improve maturity.

As one well respected CIO said to me, “The key benefit of this self assessment tool is not so much the endpoint that you reach but the journey you have to undertake to get there.”

Good luck self assessing.

NHS CIO Network Group on Linkedin

I have created a CIO Network group in Linkedin. The purpose of this group is to help connect those people responsible for Health Informatics across the NHS. This group is aimed at CIOs, IT Directors and Associate Directors etc. This group is not intended to replace any of the existing internal communications mechanisms, hopefully members of this group will find it a useful tool for connecting with their peers.

If you work for the NHS in a CIO capacity, please take a look. Thanks.

Here is the link to the group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2074660

IT Infrastructure – Roadmap or Strategy

I am taking a slightly different approach in communicating Infrastructure Strategy to CIOs that I am working with. I am taking the view that most people can work out for themselves what their desired technology/IT “end state” should be (ideally in the same place as the business want to be!). The challenge is identifying sensible routes or roadmaps to this end state from where you currently are, with the “landmarks” to look out for along the way. So, Virtualisation, Unified Communications, Cloud Computing,  Mobile/Fixed Convergence, Innovation Management, ITIL V3 etc are “landmarks” along the way to realising the Infrastructure Strategy and enabling the Business Strategy.

 … I have use this in a number of presentations recently and it seemed to go down well with the audience (CIOs/IT Directors), seems to be more intuitive and resonates with the reality of being a CIO today.

 So for me an Infrastructure Strategy is usefull but may not go far enough, a Strategy Roadmap while still being “strategic” (ie the what and why) can be more pragmatic if it suggests good (and perhaps highlights some bad) routes to take.

NIMM Balanced Scorecard -The working out is more important than the answer!

I recently delivered two workshops, one for an NHS Trust CIO and the other for the Head of IT at an NHS Foundation Trust. These workshops were for the senior management team, providing them with an overview of the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model (NIMM) and the NIMM profiling tool/Balanced Scorecard. At the end of the session I facilitated a self assessment exercise for 1 NIMM capability looking at all 5 perspectives and scoring each on using the NIMM maturity levels (1 – 5). I made some interesting observations which for me really illustrate the value of self assessment using the NIMM balanced scorecard.

1. The working out is more important than the answer During the self assessment, the team worked well together facilitated by myself and the CIO/Head of IT and arrived at a consensus of the current “state of play”. One of the teams I worked with scored themselves quite high while the other team scored themselves as a NIMM Level 1 possibly 2. The NIMM maturity level is a useful metric for measuring progress, but what was really useful was the dialogue used in the room to work out the maturity score. A number of different people from different parts of IT discussed their own point of view and “perception” for each of the balanced scorecard perspectives. At the end of this discussion, the team had collectively arrived at a NIMM maturity score that they all agreed with and felt that they “owned”.
2. Scoring your as-is NIMM maturity helps create a roadmap for your desired to-be During the conversations to work out the current as-is NIMM score, the team also (without realising it at first) started to suggest their own solutions for improving the as-is. For example, when discussing the current process maturity, while being at “standardised” (at level 3), it soon became very clear which parts of the process could be automated using existing technology to speed up the process, achieve NIMM Level 4 (”Optimised”) and avoid delays by having a more robust approval workflow process.
3. Strategy and business alignment is at the heart of the matter! In one example (for the Service Desk capability) a number of NIMM perspectives were scored low by the team, discussions around the reason for this low score all seemed to come back to a lack of clear strategy and poor alignment with the business, including some confusion caused by the language and metrics used by IT in reporting the performance of the Services Desk to senior business (non-IT) stakeholders. The good news here is that relatively small investments in this perspective would create the clarity and alignment needed to quickly drive maturity improvements in ALL the other NIMM balanced scorecard perspectives

CIOs Get you Infrastructure Right BEFORE You Start Driving Business Innovation!

I sometimes come across examples where an organisation deploys innovative technology in an attempt to drive business innovation, however, all too often, this innovation places demands on the infrastructure which is way ahead of the actual infrastructure maturity curve. I was listening to a project manager describing a project in an NHS hospital where voice recognition technology had been deployed and integrated into a radiography system. This was a natural and bold next step beyond digital dictation.

This new technology enabled radiographers to review images and directly dictate a diagnosis or analysis of the image which is automatically converted into text by a remote recognition server and attached back into the patient’s notes. Now as you can imagine this innovative use of technology speeds up dramatically the cycle time from when a scan is taken to when the consultant or doctor gets the results and analysis back from radiography. This project also generated substantial cost saving from admin overhead and increased radiographer efficiency.

When asked if the clinicians preferred the new system or working with the old dictation system, the response was that the physicians preferred the new voice recognition system, except for when the network was “jammed”. This network “jamming” frustrated the users who often reverted back to the old system and caused a loss of confidence in the technology and IT department.

So what exactly causes the network to jam? Is it lack of capacity, a cabling problem, an application server failing, a router or switch failing, the end user’s PC hanging? Some set of conditions is occurring which is causing the end users to feel that the network has jammed. How mature do you think the infrastructure is (NIMM or indeed any other maturity model) if this jamming is a regular occurrence and going un-checked?

So, while applauding the innovative use of voice recognition software, I do wonder if this innovation is sitting on an immature infrastructure which is causing a perception that IT is only OK when the network isn’t jammed.

As I always say, get your infrastructure to a “standardised” or even better “optimised” level of maturity BEFORE you make significant investments in innovative technology or business innovation. If you don’t get infrastructure maturity “baked-in” then your projects to drive innovation will fail or become incredibly expensive.

We Live in E/Mail… It’s Official

According to research firm IDC, E/Mail , as most knowledge workers will agree,  is the most time-consuming activity, followed closely by creating documents, then comes searching for and interpreting information. Email consumes an average of 14.5 hours per week per knowledge worker. This is not surprising, given that E/Mail it is the major tool used for collaboration and for sharing information.

Email is often used as a transport mechanism for documents as part of a workflow system with document workflow such as sales, operations support and other business processes.

Searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker’s time (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively).

Any improvements that an organization can make which result in reducing the time spent living in E/Mail will have immediate financial payback.

Infrastructure Benefit Types

Much of the work I am doing involves estimating the benefits from infrastructure technology, this is not a straightforward task given that most of infrastructure is invisible to the end user (and it should be!). There are many way of attempting this, some more complicated then others (usually requiring military grade spreadsheets!), but for me keeping this simple is the key.

I have created a set of what I call “Benefit Pillars”. These are the types or classes of benefits that you can expect from an investment in IT infrastructure.

Here they are:

Risk – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way specific risks can be managed or mitigated?
Cost – how can this investment help an organisation to avoid or offset specific costs? useful to include time-frames and monetary values where possible since this is primarily an economic indicator.
Functionality -  how can this investment help an organisation to improve the functionality of an existing capability or initiative? useful to give examples of how this improvement will improve usability of a user application and improve end user experience & effectiveness through improved functionality.
Service Delivery – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way it delivers service both from an IT perspective and from a business perspective?

 

How do CIOs track benefits enabled by IT?

A concern I am hearing a lot today is how a CIO should go about attributing benefits realised by the business back to the IT initiatives that enabled them in the first place.

 

IT costs are usually tracked in the IT organisation’s budget while the benefits from IT enabled change are usually realised (and reported) in the business units of an organisation (P&L).

 

This issue is particularly challenging for the largely “intangible” infrastructure capabilities such as collaboration technology.

 

Mature benefits management disciplines are needed in IT to help create the mapping between IT enabled “potential” benefits to business realised “actual” benefits.

 

The simple example below shows a benefits map for Software Asset Management:

 

 

Infrastructure Maturity Mapped to TCO

One of the things I am really keen to do is show how improving infrastructure maturity impacts Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the ability to generate ROI (return on Investment) from infrastructure investments.

I came across some research from Gartner where they compare Desktop TCO against various levels of “management”. The management levels they use are broadly similar to Levels 1, 2, 3 & 4 of the NIMM.

While direct costs remain fairly constant across the maturity levels, the indirect costs come down quite significantly as your infrastructure maturity improves.

In summary (my interpretation),

Going from NIMM Level 1 to NIMM Level 3will reduce Desktop TCO by approx 21%.

Going from NIMM Level 1 to NIMM Level 4 will reduce Desktop TCO by approx 42%.

Assuming that this trend will follow through to other parts of IT Infrastructure (Network TCO, Mobile TCO…) then there is a compelling TCO case to drive infrastructure maturity as well as the improvements in service and end user satisfaction.

Pilot Version of the NIMM Profiling Tool has been Released

The NIMM Profiling tool and NIMM Balanced Scorecard I have developed for the NHS is now available for testing within the NHS. The tool is intended to help NHS organisations self assess maturity against a set of suggested Infrastructure Capabilities using the NIMM levels and the NIMM balanced scorecard method. The self assessed scores are not nationally benchmarkeable since they rely on subjective self assessment, however, if the NIMM balanced scorecard guidelines are followed, it is possible to arrive at a meaningful score which can be used locally to plan and measure improvements in infrastructure maturity.

This is currently only available internally to the NHS on N3, here is the url.

http://nww.pspg.nhs.uk/iPSPG/iPSPG%20Artefacts/NIMM%20Profiling%20Tool%20Pilot%20Version%200.43.zip