Many business leaders believe that IT plays a central role in helping companies drive business outcomes. The success of an organization is contingent on an IT team’s ability to deliver digital capabilities and integrations at speed and scale — and this presents a huge challenge for immature IT organizations.
An IT organization that lacks maturity does not have direction, is overburdened, has siloed data and systems, and is slow to deliver innovations and transformations. On the contrary, an IT organization that’s mature has a strategy that aligns with business goals, can deliver new projects at the speed of business, and improve ease of doing business and deliver the promised value to customers.
But the question is, how can organizations ensure IT maturity?
One must focus on some factors to determine the maturity of an IT organization:
Operations
Operations underpin IT maturity. A mature IT enterprise comprehends systems as well as applications and enables communication and secure data exchange between them. To evaluate a company’s IT operations maturity, companies must examine the infrastructure, as well as its troubleshooting and monitoring capabilities.
Organizations that lack IT maturity have legacy-based data-driven solutions that do not allow them to comprehend customer data and make decisions accordingly, and no standardized set of KPIs against which they are tracking. In contrast, a mature IT organization has access to modern data-driven solutions, streamlines their customer data integration, and delivers value quickly while enabling business users with minimal technical expertise to drive operations like data mapping and integration. These organizations have modern data integration solutions and centralized processes for driving the business forward.
Strategy
Strategy is extremely important for organizations. The way an organization creates a strategy actually determines its ability to deliver success. And the strategy part remains incomplete with the right technology. Truth is, companies must have a robust data integration strategy that can enable even non-technical business users to monitor, integrate, and use complex data streams in minutes – without compromising accuracy and ease. This will free up IT teams and help them focus on more important tasks to drive innovation. This way, business users and IT teams can share a strong partnership as they help organizations deliver value.
Organizations that do not have maturity leverage legacy integration solutions, which leads to brittle and inefficient point-to-point connections. Additionally, they lack a strong sense of shared goals and proper alignment between IT and business teams.
Governance
Organizations that have IT maturity tend to have strong governance. The data integration solutions used by them allow business users to create data connections and integrate new customers in existing ecosystems. Thus, IT gets freed and they can take up the governance role instead.
On the other hand, immature organizations lay too much burden on their IT teams; IT teams not only must execute operations such as EDI mapping but also write custom coding that’s time-intensive and resource-intensive as well. Such organizations lack a culture of reuse and have little to no visibility into their applications and data.
Related White paper: Reimagine your Customer Data Integration
Mature enterprises take a reimagined data integration approach to handle operations and boost governance. They enable their teams to use pre-built application connectors, shared templates, dashboards and intuitive screens, and more to create data connections, putting IT teams in a governance role.
Self-Service
By surfacing composable assets to developers, companies can drive agility across their partner ecosystems. And to accomplish this, they need a repository of integration assets, should establish a self-service model for using these components and encourage reuse.
Immature organizations have only basic self-service functionalities and fail to consider reuse an important part of their culture. Highly advanced enterprises have a host of assets like application connectors and templates, and use self-service to enable faster development and prevent teams from reinventing the wheel.
Sure, it’s not easy to build IT maturity. But with the right technology, it’s not an impossible feat.