BPM Maturity Assessment: An Exploratory Study Perspective

This paper develops and validates a prescriptive method and an accompanying tool for assessing the maturity of business process management. The study responds to a gap in existing maturity models, which are weakly connected to the needs of managers responsible for improving organizational processes, insufficiently practical, and rarely empirically validated. The proposed assessment method integrates diagnostic and recommendation functions and is designed to support both the evaluation of the current state and the identification of actionable steps leading to higher maturity levels. The research follows a design-oriented methodology and combines a systematic literature review, expert assessment, pilot studies, and a empirical evaluation among organizations of different sizes and sectors. The resulting method introduces a structured set of obligatory and optional criteria, as well as tailored recommendations that can be further adapted to the context of specific organizations. Empirical findings demonstrate that users perceive the method as clear, useful, and aligned with organizational practice, and that the recommendations provide meaningful guidance for improvement. The study shows that integrating prescriptive mechanisms with maturity assessment reduces the gap between diagnosis and implementation and enables the design of realistic development trajectories. The article concludes with a discussion of limitations, practical implications, and directions for future research, including sector-specific validation and digitalization of the assessment tool.