Development of a digital maturity model for Industry 4.0 based on the technology-organization-environment framework

Abstract

The successful adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies by firms requires them to formulate a digital strategy and implementation roadmap. An established approach to assess firms’ needs towards digitalization is through maturity models. While there is a large number of maturity models in the literature, they present several limitations related to their generalizability and theoretical foundations. Our study aims to build and empirically validate an Industry 4.0 digital maturity model, based on the Technology-Organization-Environment framework. We conducted a systematic literature review of 55 digital maturity models, which we synthesized to create an integrated digital maturity assessment model. We tested our model through a focus group with industry experts and 24 companies from various manufacturing sectors.Our review suggests that existing digital maturity models have underestimated the relevance of the Environment dimension. Our empirical data suggests that companies often invest in digital technologies without considering critical organizational and environmental constraints.