Digital Twin maturity models: Lets discuss

By Adam Beck | Executive Director, Smart Cities Council Australia New Zealand | Lead, Australia New Zealand Digital Twin Hub

I am privileged to Chair the Standards Australia IT-042-00-02 Digital Twin Working Group. This allows Standards Australia to represent Australia internationally in the development of Digital Twin standards and participate in more broader deliberations as part of the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 41 Internet of things and digital twin work program.

The discussion of Digital Twin maturity [models] recently commenced within the ISO/IEC community, and has continued to gather momentum over the past few months.

As such, the Council decided it should take the maturity model discussion to the SCC Digital Twin Challenge cohort to gather views from our public sector, private sector and academic members.

There are clearly differing views about this topic. As such, we have created an open source Google Doc you can access and comment on, should you be interested in adding your voice to this discussion. The document is called 'SCCANZ DTC: Digital Twin Maturity Models_Field Notes for everyone' and can be accessed here.

Here are our (brainstormed) notes from our Digital Twin Challenge session a few weeks ago (as per the Google Doc):

• Do we fix hard and fast levels of maturity?

• Is there a maturity process that we adopt, you never reach a certain level?

• Complicated by others coming up with their own, by private sector

• Default to standards - is this the best approach?

• Can we wait for an ISO standard?

• BIM maturity - didn't end well when they tried to do it

• Digital Twin capability - capability maturity is what we should focus on

• Needs to be simplistic, if it happens

• Digital Twin is not a maturity - more about what we are trying to solve, and what capability is needed - rather than a scale of maturity (progress from 1-2)

• Some use cases only require one or two capabilities, so there is no ‘common’ level of maturity

• Maturity vs capability - this is the question that must be discussed

• For local government - “we will sort out the tech, we want to build capability”

• Handling data is a key one - using data to break down silo’s, better manage it. So is it more about data maturity?

• Capability of the twin (model) itself vs capability of people

• Then there are users of the twin - people - and how they grow/mature

• Then there is the community - their capability to consume, and ‘contribute to’

• Differing definitions of Digital Twin makes this hard - too much focus on the digital model/tech - rather than how you use it to make a difference. Digital model’s don't make a difference on their own, they need to be stewarded by humans, in context

• Organisation culture and readiness - is key to maturity

• Use of a Digital Twin will be different from stakeholder to stakeholder

• Defining stages of maturity important, but link to capability

• We would be better served by showing people what the journey of Digital Twin looks like

• It's not all about maturity - capability is important

• Maturity - can help with ranking, level of progress, meeting criteria etc

• Use as an internal tool only

• A soft guideline only? - why do we need a standard?

• Local government - has really different needs to private sector - a gauge of maturity can be helpful

• Scalability, and accessibility important

• The purpose of standards - build maturity in the market

• Maturity model needs to fit into the organisations vision etc

• Data maturity model needed to feed the Digital Twin

• Maturity model not linear - match to the capabilities

• Maturity just on data is hard, slowly moving forward on skills

• Don't underestimate the power of the internal opportunities from maturity models.

What do you think about the idea of Digital Twin maturity models? Share you views in the Google Doc (as per above link), in the comments section below, or get in touch to discuss with us by emailing - engagement@digitaltwinhub.org