If Capabilities are So Important, Why Don't You Build Them?

A new survey by McKinsey (you'll need to register for a free account to view it) reports that 60% of companies state that building organizational capabilities is one of their top 3 priorities.  Yet only a third of them have a specific and deliberate effort in place to actually build them.  Huh?

While this report is speaking to overall organizational capabilities, the same surely applies to the IT organizations of these same companies.  We see it all too often - there is always a lot of smoke, but little fire.

I get that building organizational capabilities is a lot harder to do in practice than it sounds.  But it should be clear that the first step to getting something done is to put forth a deliberate plan to do it.  Yet, we routinely run into IT organizations that have the speech down pat, but are not doing anything real to develop capabilities in a meaningful way - with the possible exception of technology capabilities.

We believe that there are largely six major capabilities that an IT organization should be concerned with (in line with ITIL v3):

• Management
• Organization
• People
• Process
• Knowledge
• Technology

Of these six, five of them are fundamentally about people - how you measure them, organize them, train them, enable collaboration between them, etc..  Yet most organizations invest very little in developing these capabilities.  The question is why?  I'm not sure that I know the answer (except maybe that it's a lot easier to buy a tool than it is to tackle some of these), but I know that if IT leaders are serious about building organizational capabilities, then they will need to make sure that there's some fire beneath all of that smoke.