Skills Framework Throws Spotlight Onto BRM
The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) is the most popular way of describing the professional skills needed by IT people worldwide. While business relationship management was previously part of the Business Change category, it has now moved to a new category with the release of Version 6 on July 1st: Relationships and Engagement.
This new category highlights the growing importance of the relationship management roles within the IT sector, which includes the BRM role. In fact, SFIA places business relationship management over the top four levels of responsibility:
- Level 4 – Enable
- Level 5 – Ensure and advise
- Level 6 – Initiate and influence
- Level 7 – Set strategy, inspire, and mobilize
Organizations use the SFIA framework for skills management, primarily for the creation of job descriptions and role profiles, staff recruitment and development, and employee skill assessment. Business Relationship Management is right up there in the top bracket with Level 7, so it is recognized as being both long- and short-term strategy-based. If you are interested in full descriptions of each level and how they should be interpreted for the BRM role, visit http://www.sfia-online.org, where you can evaluate them for free. Overall, the shift from Version 5 to Version 6 has been great for the role of business relationship management, as it has raised its importance. Now, BRM firmly occupies one of the six key skill areas for the information age.
This publication contains information from the Skills Framework for the Information Age with the permission of SFIA Foundation.
This is great! I’ve worked with an older release of SFIA and helped a client map that model to the BRMI BRM competency model. They mapped well, but it seems like the new model will map even more naturally! Thanks for posting this! (BTW, from my experience, SFIA is almost unknown in the USA—perhaps that will change?)
Many thanks for your comments on SFIA6 Vaughan and Jeremy. I took on the role of Design Authority for SFIA6, and as BRM has been one of my key subjects over the last 20 years, I wanted to try to improve SFIA in this area. I’m glad that you think it worked – always more to do, of course. Vaughan – I’ve been doing a lot more work in the USA recently with SFIA, and it’s growing all the time – so I think 2016 may be the year where SFIA really breaks through. Although SFIA has been around for 15 years +, is specifically referenced in ITIL and COBIT, and is in use within nearly 200 countries, it is still relatively unknown – this is because the SFIA Foundation is not-for-profit, and most people/organizations using SFIA do so under a free licence, therefore there is only just enough money to fund new versions every few years, and not enough for any effective marketing. I’ve been telling everyone about SFIA as much as I can since I discovered it around 2001 when helping a new CIO structure their organisation and process model. I thought your readers my find the 2.5 minute SFIA6 video useful http://bsmimpact.com/video/sfia6intro/
Matthew, thanks very much for bringing us up to date on SFIA and the BRM, and special thanks for your interest in Business Relationship Management and BRMI. And thanks for the video link! I wish SFIA every success! It still amazes me that so many organizations think they are ‘different’ and attempt to develop their own models and frameworks. I guess an IT-HR specialist gets more fun out of inventing a new model than trying to implement a tried and true model!