AI is king. At least, that’s what AI wants you to think (and most every IT leader, if you are paying attention in meetings, plans, and marketing these days).
Having led IT Service Management teams for over 25 years with some of the biggest organizations in the world, I’ve been privileged to work alongside innovators, thought leaders, and pioneers across almost every industry. As the Director of CX Solutions at Evergreen and Insight Global, I’m fortunate enough to engage with executives across these same market giants practically every day.
This level of exposure has given me a unique opportunity to appreciate one current theme across them all: The excitement around AI is boundless, and its expectations are limitless. Maybe that’s true, but first, an organization has to be ready to harness this new power. Let’s find out if yours is.
Buzzwords vs. Rationality
One topic that comes up routinely with executives is the maturity of an organization’s IT Service operation. Sometimes we get there in a roundabout way. C-suite leaders are keen to evolve their organization to keep pace with industry trends, customer demands, and economic efficiencies. Frequently, topical buzzwords make their way into our conversations with impunity without much thought about HOW said buzzword will be implemented, the practicalities of its use-case, or the real-world outcomes it promises.
And yes, this was happening even before AI, machine learning, and automation came along.
The best way to gauge the effectiveness of new innovations in an organization—whether it’s a framework, a technology, or a methodology—is to understand where the organization is today and its readiness to adapt and engage a new approach.
To adapt to innovation, you must know how mature your organization is.

Okay, So What Is Maturity and How Will You Know When You’re There?
Anything that exists already has some level of maturity. Much like my 8-year-old, maturity can be subjective. It’s a continuum; a lifecycle that starts when an organization takes its first steps and continues as the subject grows, evolves, and learns from its mistakes. Or doesn’t.
Over years of development, my team and I have created an objective scale to help us gauge the relative maturity of an operation. As solution-oriented evaluators, this scale helps us convey:
- How an organization compares to its peers
- How well it’s executing against a framework of operational components
- Where it can focus its priorities to grow along the maturity curve
After much testing, I can say that it works very well for corporate organizations. Not so much for rambunctious 8-year-olds.
This is the first installment of a series of posts I’ll write as we explore the main components of this maturity toolset and why they’re important to measure.
In this article, I’ll lay out the framework and provide some practical examples of how we evaluate maturity.
The Five Elements of Maturity
We look at an organization’s development across five main pillars of operational discipline. Within each pillar are dozens of detailed criteria we evaluate through interviews, audits, and observations.
The following pillars, in no order of importance, are:
- Performance Management
- Technology and Reporting
- Processes and Procedures
- Organizational Integration
- Staff Development
Each of these elements have weighting that reflects their relative importance within a business’s operational environment, which helps to quickly prioritize the most beneficial opportunities in preparing for an AI (or other) transformation
Let’s take a quick look at each of these, and in future segments we’ll explore them individually in more detail.

Performance Management
How is success defined in your organization? Does everyone on the team know how you calculate and prioritize your success measures? Do they know where they contribute to these?
Those are some of the questions we ask when we’re assessing how well your Performance Management components are engrained in your operation. We want to know what your “North Star” really is and how you weigh its value through your service commitments.
SLAs, KPIs, CSLs, OKRs—whatever you call them. These are the ways that you track and ultimately “prove” that you’re delivering on your success criteria.
However:
- Are they actually measuring the right behaviors and outcomes?
- Are they relevant to your customers?
- Are they objective and tangible?
How about this: are they woven into almost every interface, process, data source, and run book? We want to know how you’ve incorporated your service commitments into everything that you do. They should be part of your team’s DNA. We measure how much they actually are.
Technology & Reporting
We aren’t so interested in what platforms you are using—heavy investment into top-tier technology is appealing, but many times we find that the features, impact, and results of the latest and greatest may not be fully realized.
We want to know about how you’re engaging your available technology to achieve the service commitments you’ve articulated in your service-level agreements (SLAs) and deliver the results your customers expect. We also want to know how your technology enables you to scale to the demands of your business, delivers value, offers options, and facilitates innovation.
And while we’re at it, we’ve got a few questions:
- How sophisticated are the analytics you’re able to harvest from your technology environment?
- Do your data analytics simply deliver the weather report, or are they coalescing information from multiple sources to give you a clear picture of demands, cycles, forecasts, and causes? These analytics should enable you to anticipate your customer, business, and organizational needs so that you can mobilize informed actions and strategies?
- How are you able to discern causation vs. correlation?
- Do you know much beyond a simple Pareto based on Categories?
We’ll find out how mature you are in this area.
Processes & Procedures
Yes, yes, we know you have processes, and maybe even procedures. We’re focused on how well defined those processes are—and how much flexibility those procedures provide—to ensure delivery of quality, value-driven services.
And believe me, we’ve seen it all.
- We’ve seen organizations with Library-of-Congress-grade, rigorously defined, rigid processes that anticipate every possible permutation of a workflow that tie the hands of any expert who wants to provide thought leadership or daring innovation.
- We’ve also been in the hallowed halls of firmly established blue-chip organizations that proudly demonstrate such flexibility in their procedures that almost none of them are documented. They live as fabled folklore in the tacit knowledge of the experts who closely guard their secrets. (And, they will leave with them.)
As you consider your processes and procedures, we want to understand how they enable consistent and quality work while providing the authority and ability to your team members to employ their critical thinking and expertise in given situations.
We also want to see how you have built your procedures to enable your team to deliver on those pesky SLAs and service commitments you’ve made. Those SLAs keep coming up, don’t they?
Organizational Integration
Here’s something to consider: almost all IT service desks can boast they offer the most frequent and intimate contact with anybody else in the company. Imagine the responsibility and power in having a single team that is always there, always accessible, and always connecting with a user base that needs help, answers, and results. They drive the business.
We can’t squander that opportunity to align with the greater organization. So many different teams have this impact, though. In the example of service desks, we explore things like:
- Is the service desk regularly included in discussions regarding strategic IT initiatives and given appropriate time and resources to support environmental changes?
- Are regular meetings with key stakeholders held to assess their needs and to understand their perception of the value the service desk (and ITSM org)?
- Is the service desk the focal point for communicating information and data from IT to the rest of the organization?
- Are the mission, vision, and values of the organization in alignment and harmony with the unique mission and values of the service desk? If they are, the SLAs should reflect that alignment.
Staff Development
So far, we’ve explored the “digital” side of your organization—what’s documented, what’s generating reports, what systems are enabling workflows and data collection, what meetings do you have scheduled. Now things get interesting: how are you nurturing the people who make all of that happen?
In this element, we emphasize our research into the way that the organization facilitates driving value into its people. When that occurs, the people drive value back into the organization.
It’s not just about attrition and retention—you may have an organization rife with 25-year veterans. What we want to understand is if those are progressive and cumulative years that build on each other through constant development, or is your organization creating people with one year of experience done 25 times over?
Some of the things we look for:
- How is ongoing development (education, certification, domain expertise) reinforced, funded, and facilitated?
- Is there a formalized training plan in place for onboarding and continuous education?
- Is movement within the organization encouraged?
- Is employee sentiment gathered and analyzed? Think Net Promoter Score or even basic satisfaction surveys.
- Do teams know where they stand? We want to evaluate whether the team knows how their individual success is measured, how they’re actively tracked against those targets, and if they aligned with the SLAs and service commitments of the broader organization. (Yes, again with the SLAs…)
READ NEXT: 8 Use Cases and Applications of Gen AI
So, are you ready for AI? Or are you still maturing?
You can likely add any new component —be it AI, automation, or anything else—into an organization with some degree of success. We just can’t lose sight of the enabling framework that will ultimately let that new thing flourish and live up to its promises.
If you’re considering how you might engage AI in your operation, you will find valuable insights by looking into how well-structured your organization is to accommodate, adopt, and utilize AI in productive ways. You must analyze how mature your organization is to implement it. I look forward to exploring each of these elements in-depth through upcoming posts and invite you to contact Evergreen and Insight Global if you’d like to learn more about how we can help get you there.
About the Author
Gus Huber is Director of Customer Experience for Insight Global’s professional services division, Evergreen. Connect with him on LinkedIn.