Is there an Infrastructure Maturity “Tipping Point”

The amount of effort and resources needed to increase infrastructure maturity will be greater for organisations who are at the lowest 2 levels of infrastructure maturity (see my definitions of infrastructure maturity). At these levels the mainly reactive operating mode that characterises the delivery of IT Infrastructures along with the lack of visibility, control and standardisation creates a “head wind” introducing drag and inhibiting progress.

When an organisation reaches a mid pint in infrastructure maturity (referred to a standardised or NIMM Level 3) best practice and the standardised ways of working begin to eliminate common errors and organisations will find that they are able to make faster progress (for the same ammount of effort) in improving maturity because there is less resistance from headwind.

In many respects, NIMM Level 3 can be viewed as the “tipping point” beyond which the return on investment starts to increase and the rate of resistance (or drag) reduces.

NIMM Maturity Levels

In this post I summarise what life is like at the each of the 5 maturity levels at the core of the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model (NIMM).

Level 1 (Basic)
At this level, the focus is to avoid downtime. Organisations at level 1 are characterised by ad-hoc manual infrastructure management and support processes. There is no effective control of the infrastructure with non-existent or unenforceable infrastructure principles, standards, procedures and guidelines (PSPG) for the most basic capabilities such as IT security, desktop management, network services and common infrastructure services. There is a general lack of configuration information about the existing infrastructure making it difficult to assess the impact of changes and difficult to effectively diagnose problems. The overall health of infrastructure devices and services is unknown because there is a lack of tools or architecture to enable remote service monitoring; this forces the IT department to operate in a purely reactionary mode. There is no vehicle for sharing accumulated knowledge across IT. Some individuals take the time to capture their lessons in any number of folders and databases. These are rarely refreshed, few contribute, even fewer search. Organisations with level 1infrastructure find their environments extremely hard to control, have very high desktop and server management costs, are generally reactive to security threats, and have very little positive impact on the ability of the business to benefit from IT.

Level 2 (Controlled)
At this level, the focus is to get control of the infrastructure. Organisations at level 2 are able to exercise adequate levels of monitoring and control to the key infrastructure components such as IT security, desktop management, network services and common infrastructure services. Most people IT recognise that sharing know-how is important to the IT organisations success. People are using some tools to help with learning and sharing.  Some IT managers give people the time to share and learn, but there is little visible support from the top. Most IT teams capture lessons learned after a project. Teams look for knowledge before starting a project. Investments have been made in people, process and technology that will enable IT to have remote management capabilities. These remote capabilities allow IT to be more responsive to users as well as being able to remotely effect changes to the infrastructure without the need for physical access to the devices being managed.

Level 3 (Standardised)
At this level, the focus is to standardise the infrastructure and adopt proven best practice. Organisations at level 3 have a highly standardised infrastructure which uses the control capabilities achieved in level 2 to implement principles, standards, procedures and guidelines for managing the key infrastructure capabilities such as IT security, desktop management, network services and common infrastructure services. IT staff are using a number of tools to help with learning and sharing. There is some isolated awareness on the importance of the organisations ability to develop and leverage its intellectual assets. A number of collaboration initiatives exist but these are not linked to business results. The standardisation achieved at this level provides IT with up-to date, complete and accurate configuration information about the existing infrastructure and will have a configuration management function established which maintains a configuration management database (CMDB). This CMDB enables better decisions to be made about planned and emergency changes to the infrastructure allowing the IT department to be pro-active, anticipating problems before they impact the business.

Level 4 (Optimised)
At this level, the focus is to achieve infrastructure optimisation. Organisations at level 4 have optimised infrastructure, where the costs involved in delivering and managing core infrastructure are low when compared to similar industry norms. At this level, processes and policies have also been optimised so that they can support technology,  enabling agility and helping the organisation to achieve its strategic goals.
Security is very proactive; response to threats and challenges is rapid and controlled. The use of zero-touch business desktop deployment helps minimise cost and speed up deployment providing the agility needed to ensure that services are available to users when they need them without delay. There is a managed portfolio of baselined PC images as well as a very low touch process for managing PCs reducing the total cost of ownership for PCs, to levels in line with other world-class organisations. Effective software asset management is in place ensuring that organisations fully comply with software licensing and only purchase those licenses that they need. There is general awareness and recognition on the importance of the organisations ability to develop and leverage its intellectual assets. A collaboration strategy exists but is not always linked to business results. A clear framework and set of tools for learning is widely communicated and understood IT Security & Information Governance is extremely proactive with well defined and fully enforced policies from the PC to server to firewall to extranet.

Level 5 (Innovative)
At this level, the focus is for IT infrastructure to enable innovation. Organisations at level 5 will have a dynamic infrastructure recognised as the catalyst for technical innovation. The executive team and other senior stakeholders recognise the strategic value that their IT infrastructure provides in helping them to achieve their stated goals efficiently. Costs are fully predictable; there is a close partnership culture between executive, business stakeholders, users and IT. Collaboration is viewed as a core infrastructure service that enables knowledge sharing between users across traditional organisational boundaries. Mobile users have ‘near on-site’ levels of service and capability regardless of device and location. Processes are fully automated, often incorporated into the technology itself, allowing IT to be aligned and managed according to the business needs. There is a programme of investments in innovative technology yielding specific, rapid and measurable benefits for the business.  There is a culture of innovation, working in partnership with stakeholders across the organisation.  A document collaboration and knowledge sharing strategy exists that is embedded in the business strategy. Framework and tools enable learning before, during and after projects. Organisational knowledge is easy to find, easy to retrieve and re-use, it is constantly refreshed and distilled. Relevant knowledge is pushed to those that want it. The IT infrastructure is seen as being secure, open and able to stimulate new ideas. There are no hard-wired inhibitors enabling the business to engage with specialist and niche organisations to develop new ways of working in order to meet long term and strategic objectives.

Top Tips for Knowledge Flow Initiatives

1. Keep any systems simple, easy and most of all convenient to use, build knowledge flow tools into systems that people use every day (like e/mail and file servers)
2. Carefully design a taxonomy or ontology to help store and organise content, get it right and it will provide a useful structure and context, get it wrong and you will end up with another un-manageable (and not very useful) collection of unstructured and disconnected data.
3. To change people behaviour and attitude to sharing knowledge, work on their beliefs, make them want to do it, make it a challenges, make it status or career enhancing and if possible make it worth their while financially.
4. Devise a simple way of ranking the usefulness of contributions, consider feedback or rating systems. Allow people or groups to make a reputation from what they contribute.
5. If possible, link knowledge to where it is used and link it to people, make it easy to find examples of where and how using information was used, was created and who the experts are

Understand What Makes Users Tick

If you want to get the most out of any new system, especially one that changes the way people work, you need to start by understanding what people’s fundamental beliefs are.
Once you have an understanding of these beliefs, you are able to develop strategies that change or influence these in order to change their behaviour and get the results that you want. During the early nineties, I worked on early messaging and groupware projects for a major investment bank. Getting people to use and benefit from the transactional nature of electronic mail was relatively straight forward, essentially e/mail replaced the existing manual system of getting inter-office memorandums typed up and sent out in the post. Getting people to share ideas and even more radically their business calendar and contacts list was almost impossible. Whatever we did to try and get people to collaborate, was met with a wall of resistance from the senior investment bankers. These senior people felt (or more importantly believed) that they had got to where they in the business today by gathering and hiding what they viewed as exclusive information that differentiated them from their peers and competitors. With this fundamental belief in place, how could we possibly change their behaviour and get them to share the knowledge assets which they were a custodian of, but much of which ultimately belonged to the organisation the worked for.

The two approaches taken were to

(1) change their compensation model and actually recognise and reward people for their information sharing contribution to the groupware systems we had put in place and

(2) to lead by example and get the most senior executives (right up to board level) to share their calendar and contacts. Anyone in the corporate finance department could see the calendar of appointments, contact list and meeting notes of the top executives.
Thankfully, today for me there is far less resistance from people to share knowledge, the workplace model has moved on and people now see information systems as tools to help them without feeling threatened. In many respect, I now see quite the opposite, in many organisation people say to me that they want to share what they know and that they would happily re-use other people knowledge for themselves, but “if only we had the systems in place to allow this”.