According to many respected analysts, a typical organisation will spend around 70% of it’s IT budget on “running the organisation” (defined as applications maintenance & infrastructure), leaving 30% of the budget for initiatives that change or “improve the organisation”.
With so much resource allocated to infrastructure it is surprising that the potential impact that IT infrastructure is often not fully appreciated or even planned. Infrastructure tends to be viewed as those transparent services and capabilities that we all take for granted.
If you now set this in the context of the total IT budget being typically being somewhere in the region of 3%-5% of revenue (depending on sector), it soon becomes clear that having a mature and effective infrastructure can reduce costs, business manage risks and act as an enabler for improving the way any organisation does business.
Maturity modelling is a useful approach used in many different contexts (software development, process optimisation, operations etc) where there s a need to benchmark and improve capabilities.
Organisations should consider the role that an Infrastructure Maturity Model can play in introducing a consistent approach to benchmarking as-is infrastructure capabilities and evaluating what the target capabilities need to be so that their infrastructure can support the business needs and generate the required ROI.
Posted by Andy Savvides 
