January 16

Manna from Heaven — a Report from MIT on the Stages of IT Inside an Organization and How Growing Causes Pain

There are reports on IT every day. Boring, dead reports. Here’s one everyone should read. After reading it, decide how much you are willing to do to grow.

In the December 2006 edition of CIO, an article from CIO and the MIT CISR covered the stages of enterprise architecture. Essentially, organizations go through stages of IT maturity.

Don’t miss this table.

When reading the article, please keep in mind most companies stop at Stage 2 (Standardized Technology) and one can be in multiple stages at once if there are multiple divisions of an organization.

Moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3 (Standardized Processes) is very tough. This is why most firms do not ever move out of Stage 2. Its easy to look at the budget and think, “What can we cut or what can stay the same as last year?” It requires minimal thinking and nothing extravagant.

When one desires to standardize processes (Stage 3), multiple areas of an organization are called into play. People must change the way they work, coordinate terms and understand what they do every day. All of the knowledge contained in brains has to be committed to paper (or electrons) so process planning can occur.

Process planning is the work that causes stress. People from different departments write down how they think the total process works and are shocked to find out the process is wrong or inefficient. Positions may be eliminated and created, too. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep on keepin’ on?