The importance of having your IT operations teams focused on the IT services and ultimately the demands of the business is highlighted by Gartner’s IT Operations Maturity Model below.
Gartner’s IT operations maturity model
Business alignment happens at the highest level of IT operations maturity
A recent self-assessment by around 200 enterprises indicated that about 89% of organizations were at levels 1-3 (30% at level 1, 59% at level 2, and 11% at level 3). Almost none of these organizations felt they were sufficiently service or business aligned.
What we proponents of IT service management do not fully comprehend is how difficult it is for IT operations staff to understand what a “service” is and how it impacts the “business”. Most administrators have a narrow focus – on the applications, servers, and networks that they are responsible for administering and operating. They rarely interact directly with business users and hence, the awareness of business issues remains minimal. The larger the organization, the more the silos, more the organizational hierarchy and the farther removed the IT staff are from understanding the IT service or the business.
If you are struggling to make your IT operations team more business aligned, the Gartner self-assessment survey indicates that you are not alone!
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