Insight
ITIL maturity assessment survey
PA offered a quick on-site maturity self-assessment to all delegates at itSMF's 'Theory into Practice' conference. Over 70 Service Management professionals agreed to benchmark their position against other participating organizations at the conference.
Here we summarise some of the overall findings and provide commentary and observations from PA's ITIL experts.
The survey
Some 72 respondents self-reported their organizational maturity against Service Support and Service Delivery processes*. Maturity ratings were reported to us on a scale of 0 - 5, ranging from 0 (as 'absence of process') to 5 (as 'an optimized process').
* Service Desk was excluded due to the brevity of this survey
The findings
Most respondents expressed a sense of repeatability and control over Service Management Framework (SMF) processes but did not report integrated or optimized programs.
Figure 1: average maturity ratings
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Survey average |
| Service Support |
Incident Management |
2.9 |
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Problem Management |
2.2 |
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Configuration Management |
1.8 |
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Change Management |
2.7 |
| |
Release Management |
2.0 |
| Service Delivery |
Service Level Management |
2.5 |
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Financial Management |
2.8 |
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Capacity Management |
2.0 |
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IT Service Continuity Management |
2.3 |
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Availability Management |
2.2 |
Service Support
The most mature service management processes, as reported by survey participants, are Incident Management (IM) and Change Management, which are typically the first processes that many organizations address.
Problem Management (PM) is at a lower maturity than IM. With limited resources it can be easier to focus resources on IM. However the additional effort required to get problem management right will pay-off in the longer term because it can reduce the number of repeat incidents. A common mistake is focusing on perfecting IM processes before addressing PM. A short term injection of resource into PM would help organizations start to make the switch from being reactive to proactive.
Configuration Management (CM) scores the lowest of the Service Support processes with a score of 1.8. Many organizations fail to present a valid business case for CM mainly because the value is realised when it is combined with the other processes. For example, would an organization want to know how much each application costs to support? Without integrated configuration data this can be very difficult. With an effective Configuration Management Database (CMDB) the impact of changes and releases on each application can be identified. This type of information is very powerful when making decisions about your application portfolio. An organization that scored less than a 2 for CM is unlikely to achieve a 3 on the rest of the service support processes.
Release Management is also on the low side. This could be partly because many organizations focus their ITIL efforts on Infrastructure initially and don't include applications support. Getting Release Management right in the applications world is essential when delivering high quality support.
Sevice Delivery
Financial Management is the highest scoring process. This is typically a process that is driven by the corporate financial structure - the high scores achieved suggest that the majority of organizations are not only budgeting and accounting for IT services, they also have mechanisms in place for recovering costs from the business.
The Service Level Management score is a healthy 2.5 - which shows that most organizations that responded are attempting to engage with the business and align IT services with business demand. This is one of the areas where many organizations are weak, they are unable to talk to the business in a language that they understand and sometimes ITIL doesn't help us with that. For example - do end-users consider themselves to be end-users or customers? Do our end-users care whether they have an Incident or a Problem, a Change or a Release? No. There is still a long way to go in ensuring IT services align with business requirements.
Capacity Management is the lowest scoring process. It is often forgotten that Capacity Management covers not just resource capacity management but also service and business capacity management. If the business capacity management piece is neglected then the IT organization will not have a clear view of the demand that the business is putting on them. This fuels the reactive culture and makes it difficult to move further up the maturity scale. It also makes it difficult to run an effective Service Level Management process.
The take up of Availability Management is different depending on the type of services that are being supported. Typically Applications support organizations are much more focused on end-to-end availability. The availability of services is one of the most important things to both our customers and end-users so it is surprising that more organizations are not focused on improving their maturity in this area.
The bigger picture
For the large part, the survey respondents self-report a sense of repeatability and control over their ITIL processes but do not express an integrated or optimized programme. As no two ITSM programmes are the same organizations need to develop a plan of action that is especially tailored for their environment. This survey reinforces the notion that ITSM deployment is not just an out-of-the-box solution and organizations are showing a varied picture of their position to meet their strategic goals and transform IT service delivery.
 Improving scores requires a change programme – click here to view more
To download the published survey findings report click here
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