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What is Process Maturity? Enterprise strategies create business goals, which drive the creation of specific operational goals. These operational goals in turn, drive architecture that then develops processes to achieve the business objectives. These business objectives need to be achieved and undesired events need to be prevented, or detected and corrected. To facilitate this, Process Control is required. Therefore a set of Control objectives can be defined, and can include: Policies and Procedures Practices Organisation Structure Process maturity is the ability of an organisation to define, develop, refine and implement control over its operational processes, it is demonstrated and measured through defined control objectives. When we talk about process maturity, we are referrng to how effective our control objectives are, and if we are managing them at the desired level.

Some of the difficult issues for Business Leaders, Directors and Managers are: How do we gain metrics and knowledge about how well our goals and strategies, policies and procedures are performing? How well have we defined these to our staff and employees to use in their daily tasks?

Evaluating these issues consumes time, effort and money, and more importantly, how do we know we are capturing the correct information and performing relevant analysis? By using leading control objectives and service library methodologies, process maturity assessment and analysis empowers C level directors and business leaders to deliver value, ascertain performance management, better manage resources and lower risk. Process maturity assessment provides complete performance metrics on the process maturity of the organisation, and returns a clear indication of perceived and actual maturity of an Organisation's ability in it's various process controls and objectives.

Control objectives are developed over time, and pass through various levels of sophistication.

In order to gain valuable metrics about an Organisation’s Control Objectives, assessments should be carried out on various staff and preset levels which include: Managers Various staff involved in the processes Current Level Preferred level

These assessments should set a baseline of where the organisation believes their Control Objective are placed on a pre defined scale for comparison. Assessments should also be performed regularly to ensure continued improvement and monitoring. Process Control objectives can be generally measured against a scale that contains 6 levels of maturity during an assessment: Non-existent Initial Repeatable Defined Managed Optimised

Undergoing a recorded measurement by way of a staff or management survey will help define at which level an organisation impliments its objectives when performing its processes. Staff or management surveys can reveal, what state controls are in, if they are implemented according to policy and if they being used. Combined with results and charted, an analysis of these assessments delivers a satisfactory measurement of the Organisation's Process Control Maturity.

Of prime importance is the Analysis of the metrics obtained throughout the Process Maturity Assessment. Knowing what the results mean and how to use them are included in the goals of the Assessment. Let’s look at an example. The following is an extract from the IT Process Maturity Assessment results. This chart highlights the current level of a process according to the six defined Control Levels, and also shows the target levels. It is a combined and averaged score of all the assessments collected.

We can clearly see the differences between the current maturity level and the target level in this organisations ability to deliver on certain processes. Some areas like Managing the Service Desk, Managing the Physical Environment and Managing Operations are all meeting or exceeding the process control maturity targets. They are shown by a green symbol

However, the ability to Manage Problems, Monitor and Evaluate Performance and Educate and Train Users, falls short of the process control maturity targets.

They are shown by a red symbol

This information can help CIOs and IT Directors in identifying where to allocate or cut the IT spend. This will also help to identify the various IT departments and teams ability to deliver greater value and better service and align this to management goals. A CIO/IT Director could use this information to evaluate where the best investment returns can be made, and which areas to increase the budget, or even reduce spending (such as Managing the Physical Environment, which is exceeding the target in this example). In this example, how well the IT physical environment staff are performing the business procedures and processes is clearly evident.

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