Towards Assessing Digital Maturity: Utilizing Real-Time Public Data for Organizational Benchmarking

This paper details the creation of a novel Comparative Digital Maturity Model (CDMM), enabling organizations to dynamically benchmark their digital maturity against peers by utilizing real-time, publicly available news data sources. Traditional Digital Transformation (DT) models typically rely on static data such as annual reports, interviews, and questionnaires. Ad-dressing this gap, our model adopts a Practice-Based View (PBV) within a Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, ensuring a robust, iterative development process through focus group discussions and expert inter-views in collaboration with industry stakeholders. The results demonstrate that the CDMM effectively captures the evolving nature of DT across sec-tors, providing continuous, up-to-date assessments that overcome the limi-tations of static evaluations.