Get Healthy with Capability Maturity Modeling
By: Slimgim Maturity Models
Tags: Enterprise, Maturity, Strategy Execution, GIS, Maturity Model

Get Healthy with Capability Maturity Modeling

Note: This editorial was written for the United States Department of Transportation — Federal Highway Administration (FWHA) published in the August 2018 GIS for Transportation Newsletter.

Figure 1: A Fitness tracker dashboard.

Just enough to gauge health and progress.

How many of you at some point decided to take steps to improve your overall health only to revert to old habits?

I know I have!

Like many of you, I recognize health is important and society does a great job reminding us of this. I’ve tried various methods to kick old habits. I found that if I measure my current health like BMI, use tools to track progress, and plan meals around clean eating, then I’m more apt to stick with it. And, from past experience, I recognized I simply couldn’t go from couch to Ultraman athlete.

My fitness tracker has a shared dashboard and online ecosystem that makes my health open and transparent. It makes me feel accountable knowing others are watching and often cheering progress. More importantly, if my family participates and supports my endeavor, it increases (but doesn’t guarantee) my chance of success. Unfortunately, I frequently find myself in couch mode — that’s my status quo, but I’ll get up and try again.

Your Enterprise GIS health is similar to personal health. You may already be working (or scrambling) to improve your program while sustaining what you already built. Is this your status quo — is your GIS health truly improving as a result of your efforts? Do you have a way to measure and track progress? Do you have a full stack team capable of working at an Enterprise level? What factors are you targeting to move the needle on initiatives and move closer to an Enterprise level of maturity? Can leadership distinguish the difference between traditional GIS for mapping and GIS as a mission critical enterprise business system?

My experience with maturity modeling as a means to measure GIS health grew from academic research and case study where I worked as a civil servant. I was struggling to get core data management efforts off the ground. Senior leadership buy-in wasn’t translating to any relevant business transformations. We had capacity but lacked an enterprise capability. Getting healthy by targeting ‘the Enterprise level’ was more difficult than I had ever imagined.

Figure 2: A section of the Slimgim maturity dashboard.

Just enough to gauge Enterprise GIS health and progress

Networking with peers revealed the issues I was experiencing were common across organizations. And so I dug in and developed the Slimgim Maturity Model and Framework as a tool to assess enterprise GIS health. This tool was purposefully built for enterprise geospatial professionals like yourself. I built it for speed and it needed to be pragmatic. To be useful, it needed to generate an Enterprise GIS Health Report similar to the fitness tracker dashboards I had used to track personal fitness targets and progress.

Recently, a new version of Slimgim CMM for Transportation was announced in the Fall 2017 FHWA GIS-T Newsletter. Through Peer Exchange and collaboration, this group made significant improvements to the base CMM on your behalf. Language has improved, redundant factors removed, and several factors merged. The result is a much cleaner, practical, and effective Slimgim for Federal and State Transportation. With this new tool, you’ll gain a clearer picture of your agency’s enterprise health and provide the information you need to design data-informed improvement initiatives. This, effectively, is your enterprise GIS health tracker!

As the Transportation CMM model rolls out, I encourage you to use the new tool to measure the health of your current GIS program. If you’re new to maturity modeling, I recommend the following schedule to kick off your enterprise health improvement effort:

Week 1: Take 2 hours to complete your first assessment then set it aside.

Week 2: Take 1 hour to fine tune your scores then review and digest the results and summary.

Week 3: Take 2 hours to review the results tab again then design improvement initiatives.*

*Slimgim Tip: Design improvement initiatives by grouping factors that fit within a theme (Awareness, Competency, etc.). Select factors with a high likelihood to improve. Take a copy of your assessment and adjust the numbers to test your improvement scenario. This method will show how you can move the needle on your Enterprise GIS maturity. Adjust then implement your initiative.

With this small investment in time, I guarantee you’ll end up with an accurate picture of your agency’s Enterprise GIS maturity and capability by using the new Transportation CMM. More importantly, you’ll have the evidence needed to recruit others in the organization who will be required to improve your Enterprise GIS health with you, one step at a time.

If you work with GIS at a State DOT and are interested in piloting this new tool, email Mark Sarmiento at Mark.Sarmiento@dot.gov. For more information regarding Slimgim, or if you would like to know more about me, visit https://www.slimgim.info.