Most
executives understand that a business’ performance is only significant when
it is benchmarked against its competitors.
As an accepted business best practice it is expected that the
functioning of an individual organization will be measured against other like
type organizations. This practice of benchmarking oneself against competitors
should be no different for any IT organization.
There can be no better instrument to utilize then benchmarking to insure
whether the IT operation is providing a competitive product. Without this peer to peer comparison it would
be difficult at best to define if IT’s performance is weak, competitive or an
industry leader.
Of course in
order to benchmark you must first determine are my processes mature enough to
ensure that I can gather the significant data needed for this undertaking. If not then your resources would be better
utilized in first assessing your processes maturity through tools such as the
ITIL Process Maturity Framework (PMF).
An effective approach for conducting a process maturity assessment is to
create a process improvement team (PIT) that can assess the level of maturity
of your individual processes.
Through the
initial activities of the PIT you can begin to define the characteristics of
your processes. Once established, documented, defined and agreed, your team can
begin to look at what challenges you face and what maybe the transition steps
that need to be taken to begin the continual process improvement
activities. Organization and their
processes are not usually able to move from an immature state to a world class
industry leader status. This is a continuing and repeatable process and will
need the appropriate timescale to be accomplished.
Just a
couple of thing to remember. You have to
start measuring - even if the metrics are imperfect, use them. They will improve over time.
Comments