A self-assessment tool for estimation of IT maturity

Abstract

This paper is aimed at addressing the following problem: How to design a system for recurring quantitative self-assessment of IT Service Management (ITSM) process maturity? IT services are under constant pressure to become better, faster and cheaper and ITSM processes are constantly evolving. The continual improvement of IT Service Management processes can be measured by performing a process maturity assessment, comparing the organization's process performance against a best-practice reference set of processes. Several assessment frameworks exist, however most existing assessments are qualitative in nature, which makes them expensive to apply - especially when repeated regularly. In this paper we report a project that aims at developing a quantitative measuring tool. The specific context for the research is a financial institution undergoing a large-scale agile transformation. Due to this change, there was an increased need to monitor ITSM process performance, and a project to create an ITSM maturity assessment tool was launched. The goal of the project was to design a recurring maturity self-assessment, which would target the whole ITSM organization. The results show that a company-wide ITSM process maturity assessment can be established as a survey-based self-assessment, and that the aggregate scores from this self-assessment present a good indicator of the organization's process performance, especially when complemented by a reference score. A key learning from the study is that the assessment tool needs to be adjusted to fit the organization, as the language and terminology used in the survey needs to align with the language used by process participants.