Digital Maturity Models – a Bibliometric Exploration

This paper aims to investigate literature on digital maturity modelling in order to build a better understanding of this field of research which is gaining increased attention from both public as well as private institutions. The objective of the study is to outline a clear vision of what the main areas of research related to digital maturity models are and ultimately map out particular research directions that could benefit from further academic attention in the future. For this purpose, a bibliometric analysis was employed, relying on academic publishing data obtained from the Scopus scientific database. After selection and filtering, 468 pieces of literature were deemed relevant and were subsequently mapped for analysis using co-occurrence and bibliographic coupling. Results show that there is an exponential increase in academic attention for digital maturity modelling in the last 3 years, with recent interest being focused towards the manufacturing sector and small and medium sized enterprises, while other expected sectors such as e-government have fallen behind. It has also been found that digital maturity modelling is in a divergent stage, producing a large amount of different models and only in the last year there are signs of attempts at converging existing knowledge into fewer models with a more rigorous, quantitative development. Consequently, this paper proposes that a key direction of research for digital maturity modelling should be the addition of quantitative based evaluation of digital maturity components and their effectiveness as part of a digital maturity model.