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