From mostly maintenance and support functions, IT departments everywhere can now be reengineered as business value centers, thanks to a new framework published by a consortium of technology and business partners that includes Microsoft, Intel, Chevron, and British Petroleum.  The framework, IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF), aims to optimize IT operations and provide a roadmap to CIOs for creating tangible business contributions to their organizations.

IT-CMF was inspired by current research on the functional and business operations of IT in many enterprises. In a research by Gartner, majority of IT departments spend 67% of their budgets on operations alone, while only 20% is spent on enhancing capabilities and 13% on innovation. In the face of more competitive IT markets, analysts realized that IT departments must contribute in “creating business value,” or become profitable, on top of supporting users’ computing needs.

Another survey of CIOs by Ireland-based Innovation Value Institute shows that 75% of participants expressed interest in understanding how IT could actually deliver value to the company, while two-thirds doubt the ROI numbers that are submitted to them. In a stunning revelation, fully half of survey participants do not measure value at all since their focus is on keeping IT operations running.

“Companies typically invest one to five percent of revenue in IT, but without a way to measure and maximize the return from these investments, their IT organizations cannot move from cost centers to value centers,” said Martin Curley, Professor of Technology and Business at NUI Maynooth and Global Director for IT Innovation at Intel.

IT-CMF features five maturity levels, namely, Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, and Optimizing, and is is partly drawn from the CMMI framework for systems development. Its four-point strategies cover managing IT budgets and capabilities, as well as managing for business value and operating IT departments as businesses. The framework has a total of 36 core processes under the said strategies.

According to an announcement by IVI, “The main issue CIOs face in today’s recessionary climate is trying to derive greater demonstrable business value from IT spend amid tight IT budgets. While today’s stark economic outlook makes optimizing IT’s value a top priority, there currently is no integrated, standardized framework for making and evaluating investment decisions strategically from a holistic perspective at the corporate level.”

Prof. John Hughes, President of NUI Maynooth, added, “The IT-CMF stands apart from all other proposed solutions because of its development by such a diverse consortium of the world’s leading organizations. At every stage of development, the IT-CMF was tested in the real world with one of IVI’s partners.”