When it comes to IT maturity in the enterprise, Canada is generally in its infancy.
This according to a recent study by IDC Canada Ltd. that measured the progress of IT in the business environment, where the extent to which corporate information systems serve business needs determine the level of IT maturity.
The maturity model is essentially a gauge of the role of IT in the organization – the more IT is involved as a business partner, the higher is its maturity level, according to David Senf, manager, Canadian application development and infrastructure software at IDC Canada.
"The model looks at the progress of IT with respect to business – from IT serving just basic functions, such as being able to launch a new device or deploy a new application, on one end of the spectrum, all the way to the business being able to extend or expand itself based on IT," Senf explained.
With the exception of a small segment of the market, Canadian businesses are generally at the "starting point" when it comes to their IT maturity. This means IT departments in many organizations are still performing basic functions of serving technology, rather than business requirements, said Senf.
U.S. companies, however, are demonstrating greater IT maturity than their northern cousins. That discrepancy, noted the IDC analyst, is largely due to the overall makeup of businesses in the two countries.
A large number of businesses in Canada belong to the small and medium-sized category. This contrasts with the U.S., which plays host to many large organizations, with at least 5,000 employees, said Senf. "And those (large) companies have many more moving parts in their IT and their business context, so they need a more sophisticated IT to do what they need to do."
Despite the not-so-impressive performance of Canadian organizations on the IT maturity scale, businesses are increasingly recognizing their IT department’s role in the overall business growth, according to David McJannet, senior product manager for SQL Server at Microsoft Canada.
"Companies are demanding their IT departments act as key business participants in their overall growth plans – whether it’s entering new markets, whether it’s better serving customers, whether it’s providing better information for decision makers to make more informed and timely decisions," said McJannet.
But in attempting to reinvent their role as a business partner, IT departments often face challenges that prevent them from delivering what is expected of them from a business perspective, he added.
Some obstacles include hard-coded business processes that are difficult to change and disconnected silos of information that are often difficult to get at.
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