Benchmarking the practices of flexibility with maturity models and frameworks of organizational capabilities

Purpose: Organizational capabilities are crucial to achieve the objectives. A plethora of maturity models is available to guide organizational capabilities that create a perplexing situation about what stuff to improve and what to leave. Therefore, a unified maturity model addressing a wide range of capabilities is a necessity. This paper establishes that a flexibility maturity model is an unified model containing the operational, strategic and human capabilities. Design/methodology/approach: This paper does a comparative analysis/benchmarking studies of different maturity models/frameworks widely used in the information technology (IT) sector with respect to the flexibility maturity model to establish its comprehensiveness and application in the organization to handle multiple goals. Findings: This study confirms that the flexibility maturity model has the crucial elements of all the maturity models. If the organizations use the flexibility maturity model, they can avoid the burden of complying with multiple ones and become objective-driven rather than compliance-driven. Research limitations/implications: The maturity models used in information technology sectors are used. This work will inspire other maturity models to adopt flexibility phenomena. Practical implications: The comparative analysis will give confidence in application of flexibility framework. The business environment and strategic options across organizations are inherently different that the flexibility maturity model well handles. Social implications: A choice is put to an organization to see the comparison tables produced in this paper and choose the right framework according to the prevailing business situation. Originality/value: This is the first study that makes a conclusion based on comparative benchmarking of existing maturity models.