Keeping Your Maturity Assessment Alive

Maturity models are valuable management tools for assessing and managing capabilities and therefore creating a basis for their identification, prioritization, and further development. Numerous maturity assessment methods have been developed to support organizations in applying maturity models. However, these methods are mostly used for unique assessments and only provide a snapshot of the current state of capabilities and their maturity. Certainly, this does not reflect the continuous change of capabilities within dynamic organizational environments. Moreover, the systematic selection of suitable maturity models and the identification of the actions that should be targeted following the maturity assessment require more attention. To fill these research gaps, this study proposes the generally applicable Continuous Maturity Assessment Method (CMAM) that enables comprehensive and continuous maturity assessments. The CMAM comprises five steps that extend and advance existing principles of maturity assessment and can be implemented as an organizational routine. The rigorous development of the CMAM followed basic principles of the design science research methodology, including an evaluation of six organizations in different industry sectors and an extensive industrial case study.