The Further Education Maturity Model: Development and Implementation of a Maturity Model for the Selection of Further Education Offerings in the Field of IT Management and IT Consulting

The permanently changing information and communication technology (IT) makes it inevitable for IT professionals to keep up-to-date. However, the market for further education presents itself as being diversified and opaque at the same time. Especially for young professionals, the selection of the “right” training offering is difficult. This entails the necessity to develop methods and models to create the further education market in a more comprehensible and transparent way. This article describes the development of the Further Education Maturity Model (FEMM). It enables users to assign IT training offerings to certain maturity levels and consequently to make decisions about the quality of the further education offering. A proven procedure is used to develop the FEMM, implement it into an online tool, and evaluate it. Results show the appropriateness of the proposed model. Keywords Maturity Models, Continuing Education, Chief Information Officer, IT Consultant, Software Tool, Design Science INTRODUCTION The significance of information and communication technologies (IT) has continuously increased during the last decades. Parallel to the growing diversity and the accelerating development cycles of innovative technologies, the requirements and qualification demands on the employees in the companies grow (Luftman and Derksen, 2012). Hence, qualified employees working in the field of IT management and IT consulting (ITMC) are permanently looking for new opportunities for further education (Boehm, Stolze, Breitschwerdt, Zarvić and Thomas, 2011). This is not a trivial task since the type of skills required to move forward in the career depends on various career paths available in this field (Joseph, Boh, Ang and Slaughter, 2012). In literature, there is a comprehensive discussion on this issue by examination of existing and future skills of ITMC professionals, for example (Boehm, Stolze and Thomas, 2013). Further education (continuing education) can be understood as the resumption of organized learning after completion of a first period of education and subsequent employment or family business activities. In addition to the first education of professionals and university graduates, the permanent training and further education is daily routine for qualified personnel in the ITMC field (Agarwal and Ferratt, 2002). The aim is to increase competences covering a wide range of fields. Competence describes a person’s capacity which does not only consist of knowledge and abilities, but also of other skills, like, e.g., social or methodological competences (Wieringa, van Eck, Steghuis and Proper, 2009). It is nothing more than waste of funds if the wrong sort of training is done poorly at the wrong time (Berge, 2008). Results are often the questioning of training’s effectiveness and subsequently the reduction of financial resources for it. Problems also occur when selecting further educational offerings because the market is very diversified (Boehm et al., 2011). Nevertheless, attending useful training programs for safeguarding power and political situation within the company is especially required for ITMC professionals, like for example the Chief Information Officers (CIO) (Gerow, Grover and Thatcher, 2012). Boehm et al. The Further Education Maturity Model (FEMM) Proceedings of the Nineteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Chicago, Illinois, August 15-17, 2013. 2 An adequate means in order to avoid the problem of conducting wrong training is to categorize training offerings in advance in a more transparent manner by means of a maturity model. By doing so, the selection process becomes more transparent and better training results will be visible. A maturity model represents a sequence of maturity levels for a class of objects (Becker, Knackstedt and Pöppelbuß, 2009). It describes an anticipated, requested, or typical development process of formerly selected objects. These objects are pictured in consecutive levels. The smallest level represents an early stage whereas the highest constitutes complete maturity. Although we conducted an extensive literature research, no maturity model helping to find a suitable further education offering could be identified. The following sections therefore describe how the Further Education Maturity Model (FEMM) has been systematically developed, implemented, and evaluated. METHOD The methodological basis for the development of the maturity model is a design-oriented approach which encompasses the principles of artifact design and evaluation (Hevner, March, Park and Ram, 2004). In general, the development process of maturity models as artifacts follows the phases of problem definition, construction and evaluation (Marx, Wortmann and Mayer, 2012). On this basis, de Bruin et al. (2005) derived the main steps Scope, Design, Populate, Test, Deploy, and Maintain for the general maturity model development (MMD). This serves as a basis for quite a number of detailed procedure models concerning MMD that can be found in literature. Van Steenbergen et al. (2010) focus on maturity models for functional areas. Marx et al. (2012) use the Rasch algorithm for the development. Based on a comprehensive literature research and analysis of existing procedure models, Knackstedt, Pöppelbuß and Becker (Becker et al., 2009; Knackstedt, Pöppelbuß and Becker, 2009) have designed a universal but detailed procedure model which has already been successfully used for MMD several times (cf. for example Hain, 2010; Herz, Hamel, Uebernickel and Brenner, 2011; Stolze, Rah and Thomas, 2011). For this reason and in view of the fact that the procedure model of Knackstedt, Pöppelbuß and Becker (Becker et al., 2009; Knackstedt et al., 2009) gives detailed and practically feasible instructions – despite its universal validity – the model has been used for the development of FEMM. According to Knackstedt, Pöppelbuß and Becker, the starting point for the MMD is the problem definition (cf. Figure 1). Here, the addressed area, its sub-discipline and the target group are determined. In the second phase, already existing models are compared to each other. Deficiencies or a lack of transferability are often considered to be the reason for a necessary further development. In the third phase, it is necessary to determine the development strategy. This can take different forms. It is possible to either initiate a completely new construction or to merge several already existing models to one new model. A further possibility is to adapt existing structures to the model that shall be developed. Start Determination of development strategy