Structural Changes of Organizational Maturity during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Lithuania

Organizational maturity is a dynamic construct and a change that depends on both internal and external conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to examine, from the perspective of organizational maturity, what challenges companies faced during the economic slowdown, when decisions had to be made quickly, but very responsibly. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on organizations and their activities has led to a response from organizations to find solutions that are sustainable and not only able to survive the economic downturn, but also able to achieve/maintain a higher level of organizational maturity. Although information on the changes in the organizational maturity structure observed in organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic is already available, there is little research in this area. Thus, the purpose of the paper is to reveal changes in the organizational maturity structure during the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors used a qualitative research strategy to identify which indicators of organizational maturity elements and sub-elements occurred in the companies surveyed before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of experts in both studies consisted of 24 top executives from 24 companies, 12 at each stage before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research disclosed that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the companies made sustainable decisions and they greatly strengthened the hard areas related to technology, work processes, and contributions to the organization’s operations. Meanwhile, the soft areas, related to employee competencies and, on the other hand, behavioural processes have become more vulnerable.

Success Factors of an Enterprise-Wide Digital Twin Strategy

While many companies have embarked on their digital transformation journeys implementing different forms of "Digital Twins" to cover specific business processes and challenges, their main challenge has been integrating these disparate Digital Twin projects into one single combined view to create significant new value and competitive advantage for the business. To be effective, the Digital Twin needs to be capable of supporting the entire asset lifecycle from the early phases of a capital project to operations and maintenance up to asset retirement, leveraging the same data in a platform able to support the end-to-end process. This paper looks at several approaches, which large owner operators at different levels of organizational information management maturity have used to build their Enterprise Scale Digital Twin strategies. It uses the lessons learned to highlight the successes and failures of these strategies and recommended approaches going forward. The results observed, identify that whilst there is a reasonably standard roadmap for approaching the development of Digital Twins most customers begin at different points along that journey. It also highlights that the end goal may not be the same across an Enterprise and that by taking the development of a Digital Twin as a series of incremental steps, independent of the starting point, serves to accelerate the journey by driving an increase in the organizational maturity in terms of People, Process and Technology and an improvement in data quality. One of the key components in any strategy was the ability to manage the information standard for the Digital Twin at an Enterprise level, for both greenfield and brownfield organizations and assets. The paper concludes the benefits of technical and commercial scalability and the requirements to get a solid manageable and trustworthy core of information should be at the heart of any Enterprise-wide Digital Twin strategy. This is contrary to the common approach of building a single detailed Proof of Concept (PoC) addressing as many use cases as possible and then templatizing that as an approach to repeat around the Enterprise, which often leads to failure on additional deployments where the maturity and challenges are different.

Wisdom from Experience Paradox: Organizational Learning, Mistakes, Hierarchy and Maturity Issues

Organisations often perceive mistakes as indicators of negligence and low performance, yet they can be a precious learning resource. However, organisations cannot learn from mistakes if they have not accepted them. This study aimed to explore how organisational hierarchy and maturity levels influence the relationship between mistakes acceptance and the ability to change. A sample composed of 380 Polish employees working in knowledge-driven organisations across various industries was used to examine this phenomenon. Data collection occurred from November to December 2019. Data were analysed through OLS regression, using PROCESS software. The findings revealed that the acceptance of mistakes positively influences adaptability to change. Moreover, because of mistakes acceptance, knowledge workers in organisations with a low-level hierarchy adapt to changes more effectively than those who work in strongly (or high-level) hierarchical companies. Additionally, higher levels of hierarchy result in lower adaptability to change, which is particularly visible in mature organisations. The study's essence is the empirical proof that a high level of organizational maturity and hierarchy can be a blocker of the adaptability to change if the organisation stays on the single-loop of learning (does perfectly what it used to do). Mistakes acceptance and thanks to this, also learning from mistakes, supports organisational change adaptability. Change adaptability is vital for double-loop learning (organizational actions re-framing). Moreover, this study has exposed the paradox of ‘wisdom from experience’ empirically. Namely, it is expected that experience and maturity result in positive outcomes and increased organisational leverage. Whereas more prominent, experienced, and mature organisations face serious difficulties when changing their routines and behaviours.

Circular Economy Business Models in the SME Sector

The article focuses on a bottom-up approach to implementing the concept of circular economy. All enterprises, not only the most aware ones, face the challenges of this economy. The modification of business models towards circular economy becomes a necessity. However, questions arise as to whether the use of circular economy business models is widely practiced and how enterprises are coping with the implementation of these models. This article presents the results of research aimed at assessing the organizational maturity of enterprises in terms of implementing the principles of circular economy. Based on the concept of organizational maturity levels of the CMMI model, the classification of circular business models according to R2Pi and the integrated business model (the so-called business model canvas), the maturity index of the circular economy business model is constructed. The results obtained do not allow one to formulate very optimistic conclusions. First of all, a competency gap in the field of circular business models is identified, which translates into a limited application of these models in practice. The most frequently implemented models are: circular raw materials, recovery of raw materials, modification and repair. Most enterprises tend to undertake activities that are characteristic of circular economy. Furthermore, the importance of these activities increases with the age of the enterprise.

Organizational Factors of Innovativeness in Serbian Enterprises

This paper analyses correlations between several organizational characteristics and product/process innovations in enterprises in Serbia. We used the World Bank Enterprise Survey data on 339 small, medium, and large companies from various industries. Many of the factors analysed in this study are consistent with theoretical conclusions in the literature on this topic and relate to organizational maturity. Also, factors such as the size of the company and the industry to which it belongs were analysed. For correlations testing, the Chi-square correlation coefficient and the Cramer’s V test were used. The analysis revealed correlations between innovativeness and many organizational characteristics. However, in some cases, contrary to theoretical claims, correlations were not confirmed. We found that the introduction of new products and/or processes in the company is influenced by business strategy, production targets, number of performance indicators monitored, establishment of quality management system, formal training programs for company’s full-time employees, ease of achieving the company’s production targets, level of awareness of management and employees about the company’s production targets, spending on research and development activities within the company, and acquisition of external knowledge, way of promoting non-managers in a company, time frame of the company’s production targets, company’s size and main market.

From Fragility through Agility to Resilience: The Role of Sustainable Improvement in Increasing Organizational Maturity

Nowadays, due to a large number of changes in the external environment, as well as increased competition, organizations must actively support business processes. Internal management processes must be constantly improved. To understand whether a company is developing in the right direction, it is necessary to conduct a maturity assessment. The directions of changes in enterprises should be well designed and based on analysis of the gap between the present and expected state definition. The diagnosis for the present state definition should be holistic, reliable and for the expected state-based strategy and goal recognition. Hence, the goal of the paper is to present the methodology of a company’s self-assessment and definition of an individualized improvement strategy to strengthen the company’s ability to thrive and prosper. The paper includes a presentation of the diagnosis methodology based on maturity models and the resilience concept and its validation based on experts’ opinions and a case study. Companies need a diagnosis to know where they are, and guidance to move in the right direction, which makes the results of the research utilitarian. The methodology can be used for self-assessment, benchmarking and designing an improvement strategy.

Cross-Organizational Learning Approach in the Sustainable Use of Fly Ash for Geopolymer in the Philippine Construction Industry

The construction industry faces a challenging situation in attaining sustainable development goals. The carbon footprint of the production and use of construction materials such as the use of ordinary Portland cement in concrete products is still on the rise despite of many alternatives and technologies. In this paper, the local cross-organizational learning approach (COLA) and a systematic review of academic and professional literatures were applied in analyzing the use of fly ash as a geopolymer in the Philippine construction industry. Three primary stakeholders were considered: academe, professional organizations, and industry. Documents from each stakeholder were collected, with keywords including sustainability, fly ash, and geopolymer. These documents included published materials, newsletters, department orders, codes, and policies. Text analytics throughout the documents were applied using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, which uses a hierarchal Bayesian-modelling process that groups set of items into topics to determine the maturity level of the organizational learning. An adoption framework is proposed aligning COLA with the awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA) funnel model. Results show that the organizational maturity until optimization of academe is sufficient towards interest and desire, while industry is highly encouraged to increase organizational maturity from managed to optimization towards desire and action. Factors such as organizational intelligence (OI) and organizational stupidity (OS) are to be considered in balancing critical thinking across organizations. Further studies are recommended by considering the use of COLA with ASEAN organizations in the development of sustainable construction materials.

Knowledge Management and Its Relationship With Organizational Maturity Processes

In a business context characterized by constant change, companies highlight management models focused on the growth of people and, derived from this, on the generation and proper management of knowledge. In this sense, business leaders have understood that the adoption of good management practices within companies is an incremental process, framed in time and backed by the ability to learn their employees have. Therefore, business maturity could be understood as a constant process of transformation, in which the knowledge that resides in the workers is the main piece to reach an optimum level of excellence. The research work aims to highlight the importance of knowledge management models in organizational maturity processes, specifically with respect to the cycle of adoption of good project management practices. This study is supported by a thorough bibliographic review that allows us to contrast organizational learning capacity with the ability to adopt good practices.