Methods and techniques for maturity assessment

A Maturity Model is a widely used technique that is proved to be valuable to assess business processes or certain aspects of organizations, as it represents a path towards an increasingly organized and systematic way of doing business. A maturity assessment can be used to measure the current maturity level of a certain aspect of an organization in a meaningful way, enabling stakeholders to clearly identify strengths and improvement points, and accordingly prioritize what to do in order to reach higher maturity levels. However, in order to make that possible, maturity assessments must be performed. Doing that can range from simple self-assessment questionnaires to full blown assessment methods, such as recommended by the ISO15504 or the SEI CMMI. However, a main caveat of these assessments is the resources they encompass, as well as, a lack of actual automation, which many times renders benchmarks not possible. Assuming that the modeling of business domains is becoming a fact with the wide spread of Enterprise Architecture practices, and also considering the recent state of the art on the representation of Enterprise Architecture models using ontologies, this work proposes to follow that trend and innovate by using existing semantic technology to automate maturity models assessment methods.