IT Maturity – Mind the Gap!

Something that IT assessment tools such as the NIMM can do is identify where there are major gaps in maturity. Now this becomes very interesting when you are a service provider or shared service. I have had a number of NHS IT Directors who run a shared service ask me “at whet level should we use the NIMM?”, “should I assess my own capabilities or the capabilities of the organizations I provide service to?”. The answer really depends upon what you want to get out of the assessment.

1. If you want to benchmark and improve your own capabilities, then assessing the shared service is the way to go.
2. If you want to measure and improve the way your customers use IT services then you should assess them.
3. If you want to highlight problems you have in serving your customers do both

I worked with a large NHS IT provider who followed option 3. What they did was to assess themselves and each of their NHS customers. What soon became very clear was that the NIMM showed where there were large maturity gaps and these gaps actually accounted for why there were service issues.

For example, the provider assessed themselves as being at NIMM Level 4 for Change Management while their customers varied from NIMM Level 1 to NIMM Level 3. The NHS client organisation that was at NIMM Level 1 was the one which had major issues traceable back to a lack of change control. So while the provider was a NIMM Level 4 the Consumer was at NIMM Level 1 effectively “dragging down” the perception of the provider.

Now this is not rocket-science, however, what this does show is that using a common benchmark between supplier and consumer really helps show where maturity gaps are and helps the provider anticipate the type of problems that will result from this gap.

Hopefully the picture below shows what I mean..

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.