Developing a decision tree to improve a maturity model’s usability: an example for digital work maturity

The growth of today’s digitalization trend goes along with an active and influential role of other fundamental factors in organizational development (e.g., people, processes). Excelling in these factors boosts efficiency and helps achieve strategic goals, for which support is needed. In recent years, studies concentrate on organizational maturity to describe (and sometimes prescribe) how to gradually progress along these factors by means of different maturity levels. However, those studies focus on examining a set of factors influencing maturity (such as the digitalization of work practices), but are not necessarily comprehensive in factors and sometimes fail to offer concrete measurement instruments for various application purposes. Novelty in our study resides in scrutinizing whether a decision tree approach can help organizations in quickly assessing their current maturity level in addition to the conventional ways of maturity model measurement or scale development studies. We select one maturity model (MM) in this domain and build a decision tree to distinguish an organization’s current maturity level of digital work. We also examine our proposed method in two rounds of a field study within a large public sector organization. Our objective is twofold. First, we extend an existing MM in a relevant domain for which a self-assessment instrument is still lacking. Secondly, from a design-science research perspective, we explore an alternative approach to build and test a straightforward self-assessment artefact in order to extend the literature from a methodological point of view. As a result, practitioners can profit from the provided and easy-to-use self-assessment instrument when digitalizing their work practices.