Infrastructure Management Process Maturity Model: Development and Testing

Abstract

To better serve society, infrastructure organizations must manage their civil infrastructure systems effectively and efficiently, employing best practices in infrastructure management and relevant information systems. As information systems mature, communications follow a general trend away from informal human-to-human communications towards computer-to-computer information exchange. This paper describes the development and application of the Infrastructure Management-Process Maturity Model (IM-PMM) that can benchmark the current level of maturity of work processes and communications in the domain of infrastructure management. The proposed IM-PMM uses a scale of five levels of maturity (stages) and uses three core elements to benchmark existing work processes, plus one additional element (message definition) to benchmark existing communications. The resulting data show that existing work processes and communications are typically accomplished in an ad hoc manner, emphasizing the need for further improvements in the way that work processes and communications are defined if infrastructure organizations intend to deploy advanced information systems.