Maturity Models as Advisory Service
Maturity and capability models are widely employed in consulting practices and in organisations to assess the level of maturity or capability with respect to particular domains, including:
Software Development Capability
Data Management Capability
Digital Transformation Readiness / Progress
Enterprise Architecture
and many more
Platform
Inspired has developed a platform, leveraging our Enterprise Value Architect (EVA) toolset, to support the definition, use and evolution of these types of models. This was piloted in 2020 with the unique Pandemic readiness model which Inspired offered to assist organisations in responding quickly to the COVID pandemic. Early versions just led users through the assessment and produced a score in the form of a radar chart. This capability remains, but has been made generic, so it is possible to specify dimensions of interest in the model and compute scores based upon a variety of concern areas using user specified formulae.
We wanted to go beyond just doing a maturity or capability assessment and returning a score or graph of status, although these are valuable. Accordingly, we added recommended actions to the model, which are tailored to the current level of maturity discovered by the assessment. In later versions, we also included hyperlinks to allow users to go directly to sources of information, consulting help, training or other resources relative to progressing the actions.
We developed this idea further, to also incorporate relative levels of effort for the various recommendations. It is not possible to provide actual effort, of course, as organisations differ in size, complexity, distribution etc. but relative effort can be determined. This allows us to further filter the recommendations to identify those that are relatively low effort and will improve areas of lowest capability or readiness. Recommendations are stratified into those which should be tackled immediately, a second tier and a “later” tier.
Finally, we wanted to facilitate the rapid development of action plans, so the prioritised actions can be selected by the client, indicating which ones the organisation actually wants to progress. These can come from any priority level. This selection is used to generate a form to gather start and end times for these activities and responsible parties, people and resources relevant to each. This allows generating data for a spreadsheet or project plan to track the activities.
Using this approach, it is possible to go from survey, to scored results, to recommendations, to prioritisation, to resourcing and times and to an action plan in a very rapid way. We do not suggest that the entire process should be done mechanistically, but rather with consultation, group consensus discussions and the like. However, the tool and the knowledge embedded in the model and the recommendation bank is substantial and greatly facilitates the use of these models.
Models can be named and stored for later reference or comparison.
We already have a number of models, including:
Pandemic Readiness
Data Management Maturity
Digital Transformation
Enterprise Architecture
Business Architecture
Application Landscape
Note that not all of these are fully developed with all features yet. We are working with partners to add more models. Please contact us if you are interested in a demonstration or would like to discuss support for a model relevant to you.
Example
We will look at some snippets from a Data Management Maturity model in the tool.
The assessment survey questions are presented in a matrix, as shown below. The blue squares indicate user selections. Selections can be reset, and can, if necessary, span more than one box. The full set of questions is much larger than that shown, of course.
The maturity level or capability is computed for the dimensions specified in the model and rendered as a radar chart.
Next, a recommendations table is generated for actions which would increase maturity and capability. Each of these has an associated relative effort.
The recommendations are stratified based upon their contribution to areas of low maturity/capability and their relative effort. Items which contribute to improvements in more than one area are boosted in priority. A priority matrix is produced with guidance for those items recommended to tackle immediately, next and in the future. The matrix has hyperlinks to resources which can assist with the actions.
The user can select items in this table to confirm which actions the organisation wishes to take. Submitting these choices results in a form to capture the relevant timeframes and resources to apply to the activities.
From this information a data file is produced that can be loaded in a spreadsheet or project management package to manage and track the activities.
Alternately, EVA users can generate this data into a Programme format and track it using the Milestone Chart facility, in a view similar to that below:
Contact
Please feel free to contact us if you would like more information or a demonstration. Send a mail to info@inspired.org or call +27 21 531 5404