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By Mel Duvall
The last decade has seen a great improvement in the types and ranges of frameworks developed to assist IT leaders with planning, implementing and managing projects. In fact, IT leaders can now pick and choose between a wide range of frameworks with such monikers as ITIL, COBIT, ISO 20000, CMMI, and SCOR.
But therein lays the problem. With such a wide range of frameworks now available, it can be difficult for a CIO to decide which framework to develop expertise in, or whether to pick and choose between frameworks depending on the scope or nature of a project.
"There really hasn't been much guidance for IT leaders to decide when to use one framework over another," says Sue Conger, an associate professor and Director of IT at the University of Dallas. "As a result, a lot of CIOs end up looking at each of the frameworks to see whether they're the best fit, and end up loosing valuable time."
While it has been a consistent problem, the onset of the recession has caused the framework puzzle to become more pressing. Conger says IT organizations are under pressure to run IT more like a business, and as a result they're being asked to report to senior management using business terms and metrics that are more standardized. The right framework can provide that foundation.
"If you're running an IT department and cannot justify your expenses in terms everyone can understand, you're in very real danger of having cuts forced upon you," says Conger.
The Society for Information Management (SIM), a national organization representing senior IT leaders, recognized this growing dilemma and commissioned a study to provide guidance, headed by Conger and Ulrike Schultze, an associate professor of information technology at the Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business,.
The SIM Advanced Practices Council study, titled Driving Competitive Strategy Through Thought Leadership was released this week and is now available to all SIM APC members. A key feature of the study is five case studies of organizations looking in detail at how they evaluated each of the frameworks, made their choice, and the eventual results.
It's impossible to wrap up conclusions from the 70-page study in a few paragraphs, but Conger did provide these insights.
- In general, companies found that CMMI, Capability Maturity Model Integration, served best for initiating and managing a new project.
- COBIT, Control Objectives for Information and Technology, served best for organizing the management and reporting structures of an organization.
- ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library and ISO 20,000 (International Organization for Standardization), served best as a framework for managing day-to-day IT operations, such as running a data center.
But even with those broad definitions there can be some exceptions, notes Conger. One chemical company the researchers studied found that the SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference model) served as the best framework primarily because it more closely matched the company's operations.
Choosing the right framework can save valuable time and money and play a role in ultimately achieving success, but it's important to remember, adds Conger, that the framework is still just a tool.
"A framework is just that - a way to structure your thinking to get the work done. It doesn't do the work for you," she says.
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