Understanding your Maturity provides the foundation to better assess the strength and needs of your organization.
Understanding your current level of maturity is something which every organization should be concerned about. Without adequate levels of maturity, processes, functions and decisions cannot be performed robustly. Organizational maturity is a measure of an organization’s readiness and capability expressed through its people, processes, data and technologies and the consistent measurement practices that are in place.
Why is it good to understand organizational maturity?
When maturity is measured against a standardized framework and scale, it normalizes activity in a common language and forms a baseline for measuring improvement.
The VMware online Financial Maturity Assessment is an IT Finance focused tool used to determine your current level of maturity, and propose a desired level of maturity based on your future requirements. Previously, a detailed assessment like this, would have taken several hours to complete and needed to be administered by an external consultant. But now, with this FREE online version, you can see your results in about 30 minutes!
This Financial Maturity Assessment takes a standardized view on presenting the level of your organization’s readiness and capability in relation to People, Processes, Data, and Technology practices already in place. In addition, you will see your aspired future maturity level based on the future capabilities you‘re looking to achieve.
This maturity assessment covers four aspects of your organization:
- People – Their ability to Influence the delivery of IT Services
- Process – The integration of IT Financial Management into the decision making process
- Data – Measuring the accuracy, reliability and availability of financial and operational data
- Technology – The ability to align financial and operational data to deliver transparency
The maturity model contains a five step framework that ranges from Reactionary – an organization with limited basic processes to Leading – an organization with best in class sophisticated practices.
Movement across the maturity spectrum is staged, meaning lower level processes must be in place before higher levels can be attained. Within each of these maturity levels are activities or processes that must be completed before moving to the next level. Each level gives you an overview of the expected characteristics you would experience at that given level. The model provides a theoretical continuum along which process maturity can be developed incrementally from one level to the next.
The results from this maturity assessment provides a process based roadmap for organizational improvement.
As the old adage goes “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”. When you take the assessment you will know exactly where you’re at, and then plan improvement for the future.
What can increased maturity do for you?
- Improve Costs – Better insights into where spend is really occurring
- Increased Productivity – Less time dedicated to inefficient process
- Better Quality of Information – One source of information with trusted data
- Higher Customer Satisfaction – Improved business relations from newly delivered insights
Without adequate levels of maturity, many companies struggle to maintain current capabilities. When faced with change, they can yield little to no return on investment, see limited cost transparency, and miss out on best practices usage that can drive increased ROI. A more focused IT Finance function provides customers a clear value for services. A direct benefit of increased transparency is an increased trust between IT and its customers.
Your organization can achieve both soft and hard benefits by increasing your levels of maturity. A key value a mature organization delivers is the ability to objectively analyze the state of the organization and position it to take advantage of new opportunities. Increased flexibility and more time dedicated to strategic business partnering results in better decision making. These forward-looking actions can drive quantifiable returns by re-prioritizing run or “keep the lights on” activities to higher value services such as innovation and enterprise-wide initiatives.
Are you ready to know where your organization stands?
Get a detailed assessment of your Organization’s maturity level, take the financial maturity assessment at: http://financial-maturity-assessment.vmware-erdos.com/
For more information on vRealize Business and how it can help increase your maturity go to: http://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-business/
