Very big businesses are involved in Lesser-spotted frameworks – 7 (IT-CMF) – a framework for optimising the business value from IT investments.  This will be a framework to watch in 2010.

The big businesses that are steering and contributing to the content of IT-Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) include British Petroleum (BP), Google, Microsoft, Chevron, AXA, SAP, Ernst and Young, Boston Consulting Group, Gartner EXP, Northrop Grumman and many others but most important of all: Intel and the National University of Ireland Maynooth.  Perhaps you’ve never heard of National University of Ireland (NUI) Maynooth?

Maynooth is about 25 km to the west of Dublin. Since 2006 its university, NUI Maynooth, has been the home of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI), a partnership between the university and Intel Ireland. IVI is wholly owned by NUI Maynooth and has grown into a consortium of about 40 leading industry, not-for-profit and academic organisations – including those listed earlier. IVI is co-directed by Brian Donnellan, Professor at NUI and Martin Curley, also Professor at NUI and Global Director of IT Innovation and Research at Intel. As the IVI website says “IVI researches and develops unifying frameworks and road-maps for IT and Business executives to create more value from IT…”  That “unifying framework” is IT-CMF. What sets IT-CMF apart from other frameworks (although this will be challenged by other framework insiders, I feel sure) is that IT-CMF has been developed “…by a diverse consortium of the world’s leading organisations … at every stage of development the IT-CMF has been tested in the real world with one of IVI’s partners” (Prof. John Hughes, President of NUI Maynooth in 2009).

 The origin of IT-CMF is Martin Curley’s experience of transforming IT capability at Intel that enabled IT services to grow rapidly from 2002-4 “facilitating forward looking value to Intel of $400M without increasing the IT budget”. However, the framework is soundly based on published academic research on delivering business value from information technology – research that goes back to the early 1990s. This research background is fully explained in a conference paper introducing IT-CMF that Curley presented in 2007.

Development work is still underway and it is expected that IT-CMF Version 1 will be available by the middle of 2010. The IP in IT-CMF is owned by Mahnooth University with a licensing agreement for member organisations – any organisation or person can become a member.

OK, that’s the background.  So what is in IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF)?

IT-CMF in a nutshell

• It is a CIO-level tool or “playbook” as Curley calls it.
• It takes a business-focused approach. It demonstrates how to measure the business value of IT investments, select appropriate IT investments that give competitive advantage and manage IT investments for business value.
• The words “capability maturity” in the name make it clear that it has as its basis a capability maturity assessment approach that is inspired by the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) with levels 1-5 (in IT-CMF they’re labelled: 1:Initial, 2: Basic, 3: Intermediate, 4: Advanced and 5: Optimising). Curley refers to  Level 1 as “State of the Ark” and Level 5 as “State of the Art”.
• It aims to be a unifying framework tying together well known frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT, PRINCE2 and PMBOK.
• IT-CMF is constructed of 36 processes organised under 4 macro-processes that may be viewed as “dimensions” or strategies. Curley in an Intel podcast in July 2009 described IT-CMF as providing “a periodic table of the atomic level business processes that the CIO needs to manage”.
• The approach IT-CMF uses is assessment of an organisation’s maturity across the 36 processes and benchmarking that against industry best practices. The idea is that results of a capability maturity assessment will assist an organisation to identify capability gaps and value-creation opportunities.

IT-CMF’s 4 Macro-processes or “Dimensions”

1. Managing IT like a business
2. Managing the IT budget
3. Managing the IT capability
4. Managing IT for business value

These operate in a loop 1-2-3-4-1 and 1 should be aligned with the organisation’s business strategy and business context.

“Sounds a bit like COBIT and its closely-aligned cousin Val IT (value delivery from IT)”, some of you might be thinking. (COBIT has 34 processes organised in 4 domains and Val IT 2.0 has 22 processes in 3 domains).

Yes, it does seem to be a competitor for COBIT 5.0, also due to be released in 2010. COBIT 5.0 will integrate COBIT, Val IT and Risk IT (see Lesser-spotted ITSM Framework - 4 for Risk-IT) and, of course, each of these uses maturity inspired by CMMI. Each of COBIT, Val IT and Risk IT frameworks is carefully structured and the comprehensive documentation is totally free for non-commercial use. ISACA, the owner of all 3 of these frameworks has 86,000 members worldwide, so there are plenty of advocates and we should not forget that COBIT itself already has wide adoption as the de facto framework for IT Governance. The Fortune 500 companies that are seriously involved in the development of IT-CMF will undoubtedly give it a high profile but will that be sufficient?

Will IT-CMF be free to use?  This has not been clarified as far as I can tell, but I cannot see it being widely adopted without being free to use, even if it requires the documentation to be purchased with a licence fee for commercial use by consultancy companies (as with both ITIL and COBIT).

This is certainly a framework to watch and to study when the initial version is released later this year, particularly if you are a CIO or an IT Governance consultant.

These are my own opinions based on publicly accessible resources about IVI and IT-CMF. In the interests of fair comment, I should point out that I have been an individual member of Innovation Value Institute since April 2009. In addition, I have been a member of ISACA (the owners of COBIT, Val IT and Risk IT) and an ISACA-accredited COBIT lecturer since 2006.

© 2010 Geoff Harmer