A Collaboration Maturity Model: Development and Exploratory Application

Abstract

This paper presents a Collaboration Maturity Model (Col-MM) to assess an organization's team collaboration quality. The Col-MM is intended to be sufficiently generic to be applied to any type of collaboration and useable by practitioners for conducting self-assessments. The Col-MM was developed during a series of Focus Group meetings with professional collaboration experts. The model was piloted and subsequently applied in the automotive industry. This paper reports on the development and first field application of the Col-MM. The paper further serves as a starting point for future research in this area.

Towards a Maturity Model for the Assessment of Ideation in Crowdsourcing Projects

“…Subsequently, other maturity models have been proposed for a range of activities including quality assurance [36], software development [29], supplier relationships [7], innovation [41], product design [34], R&D effectiveness [28], product reliability [37], strategic alignment [21], knowledge management [38], community evolution [35,20,15] and collaboration [13,14].…”

A First Application of a Collaboration Maturity Model in the Automotive Industry

“…The involvement of the experts group enabled us to combine relevance and rigor by meeting a business need with applicable knowledge and so to maximize the resulting artefacts' relevance and applicability. The experts expressed the following critical requirements for the Col-MM: After a series of meetings with the Focus Group in which several initial versions of the Col-MM were presented and pilot results were shared, the first full version of Col-MM was completed (Boughzala and Vreede 2012). The Col-MM consisted of a number of artefacts including: The Col-MM structure that describes the collaboration areas of concerns (topics) and their related criteria; The Col-MM questionnaire that includes questions, levels of rating and mathematical equations for analysis; The Col-MM method that (a) defines the steps and provides guidance on how to run the Col-MM questionnaire in the field, and (b) supports the development of recommendations; and the Col-MM tool which is a customized MS Excel application that represents the implementation of the above artefacts, and enables the execution of a concrete assessment by enabling the collection and analysis of quantitatively and qualitatively questionnaire data.…”

“…The Col-MM explores the maturity of a given team holistically from different perspectives related to collaboration. The following perspectives, or areas of concerns, were considered essential by the participants in the Focus Group meetings (Boughzala and Vreede, 2012):…”

“…The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to apply and evaluate the use of the Col-MM in practice. Col-MM was empirically developed through a Design Science perspective approach (Hevner et al, 2004) during a series of Focus Group meetings with professional collaboration experts to maximize its relevance and practical applicability (Boughzala & Vreede, 2012). It was intended to be sufficiently generic to be applied to any type of collaboration, virtual or not (e.g.…”

Towards a New GIS Maturity Model: An Organizational Usage Perspective

“…Maturity models in information systems attempt to describe the maturity of an object (quality of a process, technology, data, or management activities) through a sequence of stages (levels of maturity states from low to high) determined over a set of dimensions defined over some benchmark variables. Maturity models are built on the assumption that "a higher level of maturity will result in higher performance" (Boughzala and de Vreede, 2012), thus incremental development is the goal. Maturity models were developed in academia and then utilized by practitioners and consultancy firms due to their ability to simplify complex reality, making them helpful for diagnosing an organization's maturity.…”