Integration of Digitization and Sustainability Objectives in a Maturity Model-Based Strategy Development Process

Political, technological and economic changes force manufacturing companies to shift their strategic alignment towards green and digitized technologies. The parallel advances in those technologies raise questions regarding economic, environmental and social sustainability issues that are challenging to integrate into corporate strategy. Recently, sustainable energy supply has gained additional attention as a critical resource for production. Digital transformation is a diverse intracompany process and requires adequate strategies. Maturity models are a well-known and established approach to define strategic improvement measures. Various versions of separate maturity models to either examine the current state of digitization or sustainability have been developed and there are few models to support both dimensions adequately. Therefore, the authors propose a strategy development process, which utilizes a combined maturity model for both domains in one framework. A review on sustainability-related maturity models as well as the connection to digitization aspects is conducted. Based on this, an existing model is extended. The model is tested in a case study to compare the impact of the models’ adaptions.