It has long been assumed that there is a strong connection between the skills of an organisation’s employees and the performance of the organisation. We can see that successful organisations attract the brightest candidates, and strong individual performances contribute to the success of the whole organisation. This generates a virtuous circle that reinforces the correlation between employees’ skills and organisational performance.

But behind this simple assumption lies a complicated reality. The organisation’s overall performance is a complex product of several factors, including how the organisation has deployed the interrelated combination of all the employees’ skills. So, simply having skilled employees is not enough. The organisation needs to have the right balance of employees with the required skills – and the wherewithal to make use of those skills in the smartest ways possible.

This ‘wherewithal’ – the things that an organisation does to drive its business results – can also be referred to as organisational capability, which involves processes, practices, technology, and resources, as well as people and their skills. Genuine organisational improvement therefore requires a holistic approach to developing capability in parallel with developing the skills required to support the improved capability.

Both practitioners and academics recognise the need to simultaneously address organisational capability and individual skills development. They also recognise the difficulties associated with doing so. It is not a trivial undertaking, and addressing all of these elements holistically can be daunting and overwhelming.

Based on this recognised need, the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) and the SFIA Foundation have been collaborating to link the capability improving IT-Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) with the skills improving Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). This was achieved in conjunction with the British Computer Society (BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT), using components of their SFIAplusadd-on.

Our intention is to help organisations identify a roadmap (what needs to be done) to improve their capabilities using the IT-CMF tools, and address the gap of how to go about enabling that through linking to SFIA and SFIAplus to identify targeted skills gaps and training requirements. Completing the virtuous circle, the organisation will be able to focus their skills-based interventions and demonstrate their impact on overall capability improvement.

Read more about the collaboration between IVI, the SFIA Foundation, and BCS, The Charted Institute for IT HERE.