ITSM Adoption Posture Maturity Model

Maturity is a measurement of the ability of an organization for continuous improvement in a particular discipline. It helps assess the current effectiveness of a discipline and supports figuring out what capabilities are needed to acquire next in order to improve performance. Most maturity models assess qualitatively people/culture, processes/structures, and objects/technology.

Finding Balance

A reactive posture is one which no one acts unless prompted to do so by an external driver, e.g. a new business requirement, an application that has been developed or escalation in complaints made by users and customers.

An unfortunate reality in many organizations or teams is the focus on reactive management mistakenly as the only means to ensure services that are highly consistent and stable, actively discouraging proactive behavior from operational staff.

The unfortunate irony of this approach is that discouraging this effort in proactive service management can ultimately increase the effort and cost of reactive activities and further risk stability and consistency in services.

The Maturity Balance Achieving a balance will ensure delivery of the level of service necessary to meet business requirements at an optimal (as opposed to lowest possible) cost

A proactive organization or team is always looking for ways to improve the current situation. It will continually scan the internal and external environments, looking for changes that may have potential impact.

Proactive behavior is usually seen as positive, especially because it enables the organization or team to maintain competitive advantage in a changing environment.

Being too proactive can be expensive and can result in staff being distracted. The need for proper balance in reactive and proactive behavior often achieves the optimal result

ITSM Maturity Model

Level	State	Description
4	VALUE	To be operating at the highest level, the Value state, you have all the previous measures discussed in place to manage your IT operations. You are also now viewing IT as a strategic business partner, respecting the linkages between IT and business metrics, using management and business application data to improve the business process and inform planning, and experiencing enhanced cost recovery.
3	SERVICE	If you have reached the Service level, You have almost completed your optimization of your IT operations processes. At this stage, you understand the costs involved with IT operations, have SLAs in place and are managing service delivery, that allow you to capture key information and then visualize it with dashboards. You are also undertaking capacity planning. All that is left to do now is to transition towards managing IT as a Business.
2	PROACTIVE	In a Proactive state, you are doing well as you have the solutions previously in place and, like many others, you may be happy to just stay here and avoid reverting to a Reactive or Chaotic state. However, there is still room for improvement to further optimize your IT operations processes. You may be predicting problems, analyzing trends and automating tasks, but you could also be viewing IT as a service provider, having guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLA) in place and measuring service availability.
1	REACTIVE	The Reactive level means, there is now basic backup and recovery. There is basic inventory management and basic topology. There is basic event management and a system of ticketing, but still just fighting fires when they occur. To progress from a Reactive position requires, at the minimum maturity of performance management, change management, Incident management, problem management, configuration management, knowledge management, automation, job scheduling and availability management.
0	CHAOTIC	This is not where you want to be. In the Chaotic stage tasks are ad-hoc, undocumented and unpredictable. Multiple unconsolidated points of contact\intake. Users call to notify of issues and have minimal mature IT operations.

Level	State	INC	REQ	CHG & RELEASE	CONFIG (CMDB)	PROB	KNOW	EVENT	DEMAND	Service LVL
4	VALUE	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
3	SERVICE	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
2	PROACTIVE	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
1	REACTIVE	✓ Partly adopted	✓ Partly adopted		✓ Partly adopted			✓ Partly adopted
0	CHAOTIC	✓ Partly adopted

Labels:

• Change Management
• Incident Management
• Problem Management