Your Questions Answered – GIS Maturity
At the GIS Managers Summit in July, attendees were able to submit questions for our live panel. While we had some great answers, there were dozens of questions we didn’t have time for, so we’re going to answer them here!
At the Summit, @PaulGiroux1, @IzabelaMiller1 , and Alina Shematova talked about GIS maturity, and shared about the SlimGim maturity model.
Here are some of your questions answered, and if you have more questions, please post them here-
Q. How is GIS maturity different than IT Maturity?
A. First, consider the perspective being taken—are you viewing maturity holistically across the enterprise, or are you honing in specifically on a particular corporate service like IT or GIS? This perspective will help guide the decision on which models to use.
A modern enterprise maturity model provides a comprehensive and practical assessment of your organization’s overall health. It considers a wide range of factors, including those that help measure organizational culture, processes, workforce, data management, mindset, understanding, and data literacy, as well as integrations, automations, and self-service capabilities—encompassing both the soft (human) and hard (tangible) aspects of your enterprise systems.
While domain-specific models exist for IT or GIS, focusing on corporate capabilities and service delivery, there are also subdomain-specific models for areas like Cybersecurity, Open Data, and Master Data Management. Adding to the complexity, Digital Transformation models also exist.
These models often overlap and interrelate. Starting with a good enterprise-level maturity model for GIS and/or Data and Analytics will give you a solid measure of the state of your enterprise journey. Then, where the model identifies lower maturity in specific areas (such as IT or integrations), more detailed factors from other relevant domain or subdomain models could be integrated to provide a clearer, more focused view and help target improvements more effectively.
Q. Did the results of the SlimGim model lead to a formal strategic plan?
A. Some organizations integrate the results of the Slimgim Enterprise Maturity Model into broader strategic plans. However, most leaders using Slimgim focus on data-driven, living strategic roadmaps as opposed to traditional strategy. These roadmaps not only communicate GIS, Data, and Analytics improvement plans but also track and report on progress and performance over shorter cycles (weekly or monthly, rather than quarterly or annually). Their actual strategies are dynamic—think business intelligence reports and dashboards like Google Looker or Microsoft Power BI connected to their assessment data, rather than long documents that can quickly become stale and out of date.
The leaders at the fireside chat are practicing what is essentially "Strategy 2.0." While traditional strategic plans are crucial for wholesale changes in some organizations, Slimgim users like Izabela and Alina recognize that their organization’s maturity and their GIS management practice demands a more adaptive, data-driven, and living approach—something that keeps strategy and improvement top of mind. This allows for continuous improvement, supports pivots and ensures alignment to their organization's rapidly changing and evolving goals.
Q. We may not be following the maturity model? However, how do we compare our current state to the maturity model? What’s the baseline?
A. The Slimgim Enterprise Maturity Model provides a way to record baseline maturity and likelihood values - setting a baseline is built directly in the model spreadsheet. For first-time users, the baseline requires you to look back at where your organization stood 12 months ago, in tandem with your current state assessment. The tool also incorporates past and present "likelihood" or "appetite for change" scores, which help you strategically focus your efforts between assessments by identifying areas where your organization is most ready to improve.
For leaders who have been using the model for several years, their baseline data is pre-loaded with data from the very first assessment, and additional years incorporated for a more complete maturity journey and true measure of enterprise performance. This provides a long-term view of performance, allowing you to track progress over time, tell the story of your continuous improvement journey, and refine priorities based on historical data. Even if you’re not formally following a maturity process, this model offers the raw materials and a clear framework for measuring progress and setting strategic priorities for the future.
