International Data Corporation (IDC), on Monday, announced the inaugural report, “IDC MaturityScape: Enterprise IT Transformation Maturity Model,” designed to help IT leaders transform their IT organization from a second platform organization that provides cost- effective, reliable operations to keep the business running, to an IT organization that provides business innovation helping enterprises gain a competitive advantage.
Revealed at the IDG Enterprise annual CITE Conference in San Francisco, the new IDC MaturityScape identifies the stages, dimensions, outcomes and actions required for IT executives to integrate their IT strategies with those of the business.
It also serves as a guide to direct CIOs and other technology leaders toward the specific areas of IT maturity that may need to be improved upon within their organizations.
This is the capstone study in a series of 20+ IDC MaturityScapes that have been developed in 2014 to help IT executives transform their organizations and technology initiatives for the 3rd platform of computing.
“The 3rd Platform is a business platform, defined by creative and innovative uses that businesses are finding for mobility, social systems, cloud services, big data and analytics,” said Joseph Pucciarelli, IDC vice president and IT Executive Advisor. “CIOs, burdened by the constant requirement to satisfy short-term business goals, will continue to need help in making sense of the longer term impact of the 3rd Platform on IT management and its ability to serve enterprise strategic plans.”
IDC anticipates that by 2016, the role of the CIO will be dominated by helping the enterprise make sense of how to fit all of the pieces of the 3rd Platform into one coherent architecture that supports next-generation business strategy and value.
IDC’s MaturityScapes plays an important part in providing the insight CIOs need to assess how their business investments in the 3rd Platform create opportunities to improve IT’s ability to serve the enterprise.
The model also serves as a tool for developing an adoption path for aligning IT to the ever changing 3rd Platform initiatives of the enterprise and enabling organizations to assess their capabilities with regard to 3rd Platform strategy and innovation and enable an ongoing dialogue between CIOs and their business partners about the appropriate direction and value of IT investments in the 3rd Platform.
It also identifies which areas of capability require improvement to align with dynamic business changes and establish standards for improving IT strategy, planning and services that span the enterprise.
Joseph continued, “Singly, each area of 3rd platform technology represents opportunities for the business, but the additive effects of combining social-mobile-big data analytics, for example, present innovative opportunities to rethink how businesses operate at a fundamental level. Companies that cannot develop at their proper level of technology maturity will face powerful competitive headwinds.”
For IT organizations, the transformation to the 3rd platform is complex and multi-faceted.
The series of IDC MaturityScapes were designed to address the top elements an IT organization needs to transform in order to be successful including strategy and innovation processes
IT talent management; approaches to enterprise architecture; service management strategies and vendor management strategies.