Maturity Assessment

Helping Cities Benchmark Progress and Plan for Strategic Growth

We provide services to assess the maturity of smart and sustainable communities, helping towns, cities, and regions understand their current level of development and identify clear pathways for improvement.

Using internationally recognised frameworks—most notably ISO 37107: Maturity model for smart sustainable communities—we evaluate key aspects of urban transformation through the lens of global best practice.

Whether your city is just beginning its smart journey or looking to strengthen and scale its digital and sustainability initiatives, a maturity assessment offers a powerful diagnostic tool to guide strategy, investment, and capacity building.

Why Maturity Assessment Matters

Smart and sustainable transformation is a long-term, multi-dimensional process. Cities often face questions such as:

  • How advanced are we in our digital development and sustainability goals?

  • What are our current capabilities—and where are the gaps?

  • Which areas should we prioritise next?

  • How do we compare with other cities or international benchmarks?

  • Are our governance, infrastructure, and community engagement practices aligned with best practice?

Maturity assessments help answer these questions through a structured process that builds understanding, drives alignment, and supports more confident decision-making.

Benefits and Outcomes

Cities and regions working with us on maturity assessment gain:

  • A shared understanding of where they stand—and where to go next

  • Evidence-based guidance to shape strategy and investment

  • A structured foundation for continuous improvement

  • Enhanced readiness for certification, funding, or partnership opportunities

  • A means of tracking and reporting progress over time

This process not only supports strategic clarity—it helps build internal alignment, momentum, and confidence for change.

Turn Insight Into Action

Maturity is not about achieving perfection — it’s about knowing where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there. With a standards-based assessment, your place can move forward with clarity, purpose, and alignment to global good practice.

What We Assess

Our standards-based maturity assessments take a holistic view, examining a city’s performance across a set of key domains that reflect international smart city frameworks. Typical dimensions include:

  • Governance and Leadership: Vision, coordination, accountability, and institutional capacity for smart and sustainable development.

  • Digital Infrastructure: Connectivity, platforms, interoperability, and data systems.

  • Service Delivery and Integration: Use of technology to improve public services, from transport and energy to health and housing.

  • Citizen Engagement and Participation: Mechanisms for inclusive co-creation, feedback, and digital rights.

  • Environmental Sustainability: Use of digital tools to support climate action, decarbonisation, and resource efficiency.

  • Economic Development and Innovation: Support for local innovation ecosystems, digital skills, and the digital economy.

  • Data Governance and Evidence-Based Decision-Making: Data policies, ethical standards, and analytics capacity to inform public action.

  • Resilience and Adaptability: Systems thinking, scenario planning, and the ability to respond to disruption and change.

These dimensions are assessed against defined levels of maturity, usually ranging from “initial” or “emerging” through to “advanced”, “optimising” or “innovating”.

Methodology

Our assessments are designed to be collaborative, insightful, and grounded in local realities. A typical engagement involves:

  • Baseline Review: We analyse existing strategies, policies, data assets, governance structures, and previous assessments or audits.

  • Structured Evaluation: Using tools aligned with ISO 37107 and complementary frameworks (such as ISO 37106, ISO 37122, and ISO 37101), we conduct a structured analysis of each maturity domain.

  • Stakeholder Workshops: We facilitate sessions with cross-departmental and cross-sector stakeholders to gather insights, identify gaps, and build consensus on current maturity levels.

  • Surveys and Interviews: Where appropriate, we gather perspectives from residents, businesses, and institutional partners to inform a more complete picture.

  • Benchmarking and Analysis: We compare findings to relevant benchmarks (national, regional, or global) to contextualise the results.

  • Diagnostic Report: We produce a comprehensive report outlining the city’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and actionable next steps across all domains.

We also provide optional visualisations and infographics to help communicate the findings to wider audiences, including political leaders, funders, and community stakeholders.