I had a question from a colleague recently that I’d like to address in this post. She asked, “Im going to ask a possibly ‘dumb’ question, but since I believe that there are no dumb questions Im asking it anyway Since level 3 is constantly evolving i.e., todays Level 3 will be tomorrows Level 2 etc., isnt it always going to be a moving target? If I was a company at Level 3 Business-IT Maturity, where IT and business act as one in strategy, planning and execution, and so on, wont you eventually fall to Level 2 if you dont keep changing? How do leading edge companies do that?”

As she noted, there are no dumb questions, and this is actually a very smart question. First, a reminder. We recently updated the 3-level Business-IT Maturity Model to more clearly show that it is really made up of 3 separate ‘S’ shape, or ‘learning’ curves.

The significance here is the discontinuities that occur between levels. To simplify, Level 1 was about learning to leverage (business demand) and manage (IT supply) the universe of mainframe computing. The big discontinuity that threw everyone was the entry of the Personal Computer, and the seismic shift to client-server computing. So, Level 2 was the same as Level 1, but for client-server computing. The seismic shift today is ultimately caused by the Internet as a computing platform, with all its consequences, including Service Oriented Architecture, Software (and Hardware) as a Service, Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and so on. Level 3, then, is about learning to leverage (business demand) and manage (IT supply) the universe of Internet computing.

The fact that this is a discontinuity gives us choices about how, when and why we jump from the Level 2 curve to the Level 3 curve. Some are jumping early, and for everything (e.g., Google, Amazon.com). Some are jumping early for some things (e.g., ING Direct, but not ING), and most are not jumping at all at this time.

Back to my colleague’s question. The way we are using the Business-IT Maturity Model, from the perspective of today, high Level 3 means we have mastered the new computing paradigm, both from a business demand and IT supply perspective. There will have been such a confluence between what we today know as “business” and as “IT” that these things will be inextricably interwoven. Some will say we are already at this point, but I beg to differ. These things are deeply interdependent, but still most organizations have IT specialists (internal or external) who are responsible for “doing” most IT development and support work. On the other hand, most “business” people are ‘users’ of IT but not ‘producers.’ I believe that by 2017, the focus of this blog, that situation will have changed dramatically, and most organizations will be well into the Level 3 space. As she noted in her question, they will have to work at staying at at high Level 3 - entropy, anarchyand other forces are always working to undo the good work of management.

Note, the ‘S’ curves become asymptotic to the horizontal - but never become horizontal, so I could answer my colleague by saying, “There is no ‘after Level 3′ - just a long, slow, journey through it.” Or, I could say, “There will be some other seismic shift, as yet unanticipated (at least by me!) and we will transition through another discontinuity.”

What I actually said was, “Level 3 does change over time when everyone has reached Level 3, the model will no longer be valuable. As an analogy, once you are an adult and stop growing, you tend not to obsess the way kids do about how many inches youve grown over a year. The Business-IT Maturity Model will have outlived its usefulness, I will be retired and living on a Caribbean Island, and some other blogger will be all in a lather about some new maturity model!” See, it was not a dumb question after all!