Understanding Capability Progression: A Model for Defining Maturity Levels for Organizational Capabilities

The pressure for organizations to gain and keep their competitive advantage necessitates continuous assessment and improvement of their capabilities. Maturity modeling has emerged as a management approach to guide organizations in developing and improving their capabilities, following a structured path for improvement within a specific domain. Existing research lacks a theoretically grounded model for defining maturity levels, particularly concerning organizational capabilities. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a model for defining maturity levels for organizational capabilities. Drawing on the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, the model defines the characteristics of organizational capabilities across six maturity levels. The model is developed following design science research and demonstrated and evaluated in the development of a data analytics maturity model. The findings of the expert survey provided positive evidence regarding the validity, relevance, completeness, clarity, and utility. We emphasize the distinction between capability-based and process-based maturity levels and propose our model as a tool to support the development of capability-based maturity models in various domains.