Level 1: Vendors do all your IT work. You do not have in-house IT experts, architects, or leadership with deep technical expertise. You are a very domain-focused company. You have in-house managers who somehow manage IT.
Level 2: You have in-house IT resources, but no cohesive vision exists. Different groups manage hundreds of individual applications on various platforms and technologies. You do not have a great deal of technology research, strategy, and a roadmap. Cross-functional collaboration is missing, and there is a great deal of duplication of efforts – multiple groups building the same kind of technology capabilities. You may have tried outsourcing but failed at it.
Level 3: You have in-house IT experts, but the IT organization is too slow to adapt, and the IT cost is proportionately higher. You mostly build commodity types of software with high costs. You also tend to lack vision for the future, and your technology sophistication is in the middle. You give more importance to the process than the outcome. Your outsourcing capabilities are limited.
Level 4: You have both in-house IT experts and outsourced partners. Both work effectively together, and you have figured out how to leverage outsourcing effectively to reduce costs while still maintaining quality. You do talk about innovation and there may be some in the pipeline. You have streamlined internal processes, and your agile methodologies are driven by need, not by a template. Level 4 is a good place to be. You are ahead of most players at this time.
Level 5: Your organization has true mastery over understanding customer needs ahead of time. Your organization is research-driven, and your digital strategy is born out of true collaboration with customers, stakeholders, and partners. You give great importance to building human capital with domain knowledge, and you focus more on skills than roles. Some of the critical skills for technology success are domain knowledge, business analysis, digital strategy, the ability to build sophisticated software and platforms at a lower cost, the experience of building and running large infrastructures, and above all you have mastery over knowing and communicating technical requirements to remote teams. In agile terms having deep and wide backlogs ahead of time, your organization has a way to bring scalability of skills to meet ever-changing market demands rapidly. You invest significantly in innovation, and understand its importance. Your organization does not believe in any set process but in observing, measuring, and adapting. And above all, you have a sharp eye for waste. You understand that failures will eventually catch up, so you are never complacent.
GateZero is for organizations wanting to transcend to level 5 and beyond. It has tools and skills that bring about core organizational change, leading to a gradual transition from the current maturity level to level 5 and beyond.
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