How digitally mature is your research partnership operation?

Partnership performance sits on top of partnership infrastructure. You can hire the right relationship managers and sign the right agreements, and still lose months because your contract system, your data environment, or your governance structure can’t carry the load. Our research found exactly this pattern across five major U.S. public research universities: digital tools fragmented across silos, contract teams disconnected from research administration, partnership data living in spreadsheets and email threads.

Digital maturity, in partnership work, is not about chasing tools. It is about whether eight specific domains are in place, and the domains are interdependent: cybersecurity does not mature independently of data governance, and change management does not mature without leadership commitment. Because the domains differ in how much they move the outcome, the composite is weighted — Digital Governance (20%) and Cybersecurity (17%) carry the most weight, Knowledge Management (5%) the least.

Rate 32 statements on a 1–5 scale (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). Each domain’s average is converted to a 0–100 score, and the weighted composite places you on a five-level maturity scale (Initial, Developing, Defined, Managed, Optimizing) modeled on the Capability Maturity Model. You’ll get a per-domain heatmap that shows which domains are carrying you, which are bottlenecks, and the highest-priority move by weighted gap.