MORE THAN 40 public and private companies, including Intel, Microsoft, Xilinx and the ESB, have created a consortium that aims to optimise the value businesses get from technology investments.

This week the Innovation Value Institute (IVI), located at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, announced the launch of its first initiative, IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). The IT-CMF aims to provide a structured roadmap for business management of technology projects.

According to Kevin Cooney, Xilinx’s European managing director, every IT organisation spends its time doing two things; one is increasing its infrastructure which supports the ability of people to log on with their PC, the second is running projects and working with business partners to deliver value to the organisation.

It is here, he says, that IT-CMF plays a key role in creating a framework and processes that facilitate the rollout of such projects.

“The other important thing is that it enables you to follow a basic questionnaire which gives you a maturity curve as to where you are in context of the framework – whether you’re at level one, two, three, four of five. And once you’ve identified what level you’re at, the framework allows you to build your capability over a period of time by giving you these procedures, policies and repeatable environments to operate in.”

Xilinx has put the framework to use in its organisation. “What we’ve taken from it is a set of policies and processes that help us ensure that when we deliver projects, we do it in a repeatable manner that has a set of standards,” Mr Cooney adds.

ESB chief information officer Peter O’Shea says it has utilised IT-CMF to develop internal methodologies. “Information technology is a complex area and IT-CMF is a way of taking that complexity and understanding it better and measuring it.”