IT maturity self-assessment: does a quantitative survey get it right?

Abstract: It has become increasingly recognized that IT organizations must ensure that the IT services are aligned to the business needs and actively support them. Therefore, the internal IT service management processes are under constant improvement. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most commonly adopted framework for IT service management. It is recommended to start an ITIL implementation or improvement process by defining a baseline of “where we are today” (current state). This helps identify the gap to a wanted future state and will become the basis for an ITIL implementation or improvement plan. One of the most commonly used methods to define the current state is to do a maturity assessment using a quantitative self-assessment approach. The purpose of this thesis is to empirically understand how well a quantitative self-assessment defines the as-is state and thereby the maturity of an IT organization. The research was carried out by conducting a quantitative self-assessment in an IT organization. To understand if the self-assessment produced viable results a meta-evaluation of the survey was conducted through means of interviews and a document study. This resulted in the conclusion that the use of a quantitative self-assessment does not define the as-is state and maturity well enough.