A Meta-Synthesis Analysis for Identifying the Essential Principles and Elements for Designing a Maturity Model

Since the designing of the first maturity models by Crosby and Nolan in the late 1970s, various maturity models have been developed in a wide range of applied fields such as information technology, knowledge management, human capital management, and so on. However, few methods and theories have been presented on how to design maturity models, and their structure, elements and architecture. Many of the writers have notified the deficiency of a comprehensive and generally accepted method. A review of the present maturity models reveal that most of them, disregarding the methodological foundations of maturity model designing, have only imitated the structure of Crosby and Nolan proposed model.  Researchers who intend to develop maturity models bewildered on how many types of maturation models they can have, what benefits and limitations each of them can have, what the structure and elements of the maturity model is, and what components should be considered in its designing. Since providing an acceptable and comprehensive approach to the development of the maturity model require a deeper understanding of the current approaches and their assumptions and limitations, after giving an introduction to the concept of maturity models using the qualitative interpretive meta-analysis, the researchers identified 14 different and available approaches on how to design a model or maturity network. Based on the principles of designing these models, and according to their main themes, a deeper understanding of the most important components involved in the design of the maturity model was presented. To this end, the most important elements and themes of these 14 approaches are reported by “text to text” technique, according to the time precedence of each of them.