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. For efficient implementation of computer-based exchange of information, these communications must be formally described. As part of a larger study into the formalization of communications within the infrastructure industry, this paper examines the level to which work processes and communications are formalized and designed at present within the domain of infrastructure management. The research adopts a maturity model approach. There are many maturity models available in different industries, but their focus is on the maturity of the way work processes and communication are operated and managed, not the way these work processes and communications are formalized and designed. To address the issue, an Infrastructure Management-Process Maturity Model (IM-PMM) is developed to assess the degree to which work processes and communications are formalized within a specific engineering domain, namely infrastructure management. A five-step approach is used to develop the IM-PMM: define the problem, compare existing maturity models, develop the model, apply the model, and evaluate the maturity model. 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 (i.e. process/transaction map definition, actor/role definition, and information definition) to benchmark existing work processes, plus one additional element (message definition) to benchmark existing communications. The proposed model has been applied and tested in the domain of infrastructure management using a structured interview approach. 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. The proposed IM-PMM would help the transaction development personnel (including transaction analysts, transaction designers, software developers, process modellers, and industry experts) to assess and benchmark the maturity of the work processes and communications in the domain of infrastructure. As part of the evaluation, the proposed IM-PMM is verified through testing and applying it in the domain of infrastructure management; future work will conduct validation through industry expert review.