Benchmarking your operations against a digital maturity model only works if you are honest about two things: what the model measures, and where the evidence for your current position is coming from. Too many organisations skip both and land on a maturity level that reflects internal opinion rather than evidence. This guide walks through what a maturity model covers, how to benchmark against it properly, and what to do with the result.
What a digital maturity model measures
A digital maturity model is a structured way of describing how effectively an organisation uses technology, data and digital ways of working to achieve its business goals, benchmarked against defined levels of capability. The useful models share a common structure: they assess across people, process and technology together, not technology in isolation, because a business can have modern systems and still be immature if the operating model and the workforce around those systems have not caught up.
For asset-intensive businesses specifically, the model has to account for constraints that a generic corporate maturity model ignores: legacy operational technology that cannot simply be replaced, safety-critical systems that cannot be experimented on casually, and site-based workforces that are harder to bring along on a change program than an office-based team.
Why self-assessment usually gets it wrong
Internal perception of maturity is often disconnected from reality. PwC’s Mine 2026 report found 40 per cent of mining CEOs believe their organisation’s technology performance has fallen below their own expectations, evidence that even leadership’s internal read on maturity is frequently overly optimistic until it is tested against outside evidence (PwC, June 2026). The organisations that get real value from a maturity exercise treat it as an evidence-gathering exercise, not a scorecard exercise: structured workshops and discovery sessions with the people who run operations day to day, rather than a survey completed by one or two people at head office.
The six factors that separate high performers from the rest
BCG’s research into 900 digital transformations found the gap between success and failure is not random. Six factors flip the odds of success from roughly 30 per cent to around 80 per cent (BCG, 2020):
- An integrated strategy with clear, specific transformation goals, rather than a general ambition to “modernise”
- Leadership commitment that runs from the CEO through to middle management, not just an executive sponsor
- High-caliber talent deployed to the initiative, not whoever happens to be available
- An agile governance approach that drives broader adoption rather than a rigid, top-down rollout
- Active monitoring of progress against defined outcomes, so drift gets caught early
- A business-led technology and data platform, shaped by operational needs rather than handed down from IT alone
A maturity benchmark is most useful when it is read against these six factors specifically: not just “where are we,” but “which of these six are in place, and which are the reason we are stuck.”
Benchmarking your own operations: a practical starting point
Before commissioning a formal assessment, it is worth testing a few honest questions internally:
Can operations, IT and the executive team each independently describe the current digital maturity level the same way, or do the answers contradict each other?
Is there a documented roadmap connecting current investment to a stated business outcome, or is spend happening project by project without a common thread?
When a system has gone live in the last two years, is it being used the way it was designed to be used, or has usage quietly drifted back to old workarounds?
If those answers are inconsistent, uncertain, or simply unknown, that is the signal a structured benchmarking exercise is worth more than another internal debate.
Turning a benchmark into a roadmap
A maturity model is only valuable if the result comes with a next step. The output should include a clear current-state snapshot, a gap analysis against where the business needs to be, near-term opportunities that do not require a large program to capture, and an improvement roadmap with realistic budget ranges attached, not a maturity score with nowhere to go from there.
Get an evidence-based benchmark
A digital maturity assessment benchmarks your organisation across people, process and technology using a structured, evidence-based methodology built specifically for mining, oil, gas and energy operations. Talk to our team about what a benchmark would look like for your business.