Towards an Integrated Maturity Model of System and E-Business Applications in an Emerging Economy

Although there is a great number of maturity models proposed for Information Systems, most of them have three limitations: (1) they are focused on a single or small subset of companies; (2) they do not address the evolution of enterprise systems and e-business applications, simultaneously; (3) they are only focused on developed countries and do not consider emerging economies. We developed a maturity model of Information Systems that addresses these limitations through a data mining approach. The results showed that clustering analysis was an effective method for discovering similar groups of companies according to the set of enterprise systems and e-business applications that they adopted. Two major conclusions can be outlined: Unlike previous models, it has been shown that companies can be grouped only in three stages of maturity. Furthermore, the evolutionary pattern of systems adopted by companies follows a path oriented to obtain greater efficiencies at the expense of those that strengthen the relationship with customers. The results are relevant to practitioners, researchers and policy makers in emerging economies.