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Standard ways of doing business are slowly making inroads into the Wild West world of information technology departments, and a local company and an international organization are working to help lay down the law.
In Wakefield, startup Panviva Inc. is marketing software that helps businesses define the vital methods a company runs on and turn them into repeatable, trainable, standardized processes. Meanwhile, Boston recently played host to the U.S. conference for the Innovation Value Institute, an Ireland-based group born out of Intel Corp. that is hoping to create an internationally recognized set of standards for how IT departments function as a business.
The key to establishing IT business standards, Panviva CEO David Frenkel said, is repeatability.
“If any individual leaves, the process endures,” Frenkel said.
To do this, Panviva makes software that both learns how a business method is performed, and then can be set up to help guide inexperienced users through that process with consistent results.
“Our application sits on the desktop and knows what applications you have open and gives you step-by-step directions on where to go,” Frenkel said.
And those processes are the type of key elements that the Innovation Value Institute is using to establish its IT capability maturity framework (IT-CMF), which the organization is hoping to bring before the International Standards Organization. The goal, according to Martin Curley, global director of IT innovation for Intel and a professor at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where the institute is based, is to have the standards framework become as broadly accepted as the ISO 9001 standard is for manufacturing companies.
For that to happen, Curley said, there needs to be a demonstrable value to implementing the framework, and that starts with being able to measure things.
“The key thing is, if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it and the IT-CMF helps with that,” Curley said.
While in Boston at the beginning of the month, the institute held the official rollout of the IT-CMF, and a number of chief information officers came to find out what it was all about, including Peter Forte, CIO of Analog Devices Inc. of Norwood. While Forte has not yet adopted the institute’s framework for standardizing IT processes, he sees that there could be a great deal of value in doing so.
“The framework and its 36 critical processes is something that could help us,” he said. “It can almost apply in every area.”
One of the main goals in establishing the framework, or adopting software to help establish standard processes like that from Panviva, is to realize the real return on investment in IT, Forte said.
Andrew Updegrove, a partner with Gessemer Updegrove LLP and a standards expert, said there is one question CIOs will ask before moving forward with either approach.
“‘Does the data that comes out make sense and is it meaningful, and will my CEO pay attention to it?’” he said. “It will be a few years with something like this before you really know if it’s a win or a lose.”
Panviva, which began in the early 2000s in Australia and moved to Boston in 2008 when Frenkel came on board as CEO, wouldn’t disclose revenue. The company, whose product, SupportPoint, costs about $100,000 for an enterprisewide license, took a single round of funding in the early 2000s from an early investor in Australia, and is on a solid growth path, Frenkel said.
“We grew 100 percent last fiscal year and have grown the Boston office in the last 10 months from pretty much scratch to about 15 people today,” Frenkel said. Panviva, which counts 42 employees total including Australian operations, is about to close its first round from an American venture firm in March, although Frenkel wouldn’t disclose details.
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