Why It’s Time to Retire CMMI

For decades, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) has been treated as the gold standard of organizational discipline. Consulting firms sell it, governments demand it, and executives flaunt certification as proof of operational excellence. In the 1990s and early 2000s, this made sense: CMMI gave large organizations a framework for consistency, predictability, and risk management.

But the world has changed. Digital transformation has rewritten the rules of competition. Today, advantage comes from adaptability, speed, and relentless customer focus—not from perfecting standardized processes. In this new reality, CMMI is no longer a badge of honor. It’s a relic. And worse, it’s a barrier to evolution.

CMMI was born out of a legitimate need. Complex projects—especially in defense, aerospace, and other high-stakes industries—required a level of rigor that ad‑hoc practices couldn’t deliver. CMMI offered a roadmap: define processes, enforce them across the enterprise, and continuously refine them. For organizations built on waterfall delivery cycles and long-term contracts, this model created stability.

In that context, CMMI worked. It reduced chaos, minimized variance, and gave stakeholders confidence that projects wouldn’t collapse under their own complexity. It was never meant to be fast or flexible. It was meant to be safe.

In today’s digital economy, businesses are rewarded for speed, adaptability, and outcomes. Yet CMMI still pushes organizations to prioritize compliance over learning, standardize teams into uniformity, and equate maturity with bureaucracy.

This is the opposite of what digital evolution requires. In a world of Agile, DevOps, cloud-native platforms, and continuous delivery, speed is safety, experimentation drives learning, and outcomes—not compliance—are the metric of success. Trying to overlay CMMI on digital transformation is like forcing a jazz band to follow the rules of a marching band: both produce music, but only one thrives on improvisation.

If CMMI is such a poor fit for digital evolution, why does it persist? Because the consulting community keeps it alive. Frameworks like CMMI are familiar, marketable, and billable. Selling maturity assessments and readiness programs is easier than engaging in the messier, outcome‑driven work of real transformation.

In many cases, CMMI adoption is theater: organizations chase certification to win contracts or satisfy auditors. They collect documentation, standardize processes, and pass audits—while innovation stalls, outcomes lag, and employees grow frustrated. The badge shines while the business stagnates.

By defending CMMI as the default standard, consultants risk becoming bottlenecks to the very change they’re supposed to enable. We are complicit in keeping organizations trapped in outdated models—unless we change, we risk irrelevance alongside the frameworks we cling to.

Digital transformation is a structural shift in how organizations create value. The practices that define digital leaders—Agile at scale, DevOps, CD/CI, cloud‑native architectures, data‑driven and AI‑assisted decision‑making—bear little resemblance to the world where CMMI was conceived.

Simply modernizing CMMI isn’t enough. Adding Agile terms or DevOps buzzwords won’t fix the core problem: the model equates maturity with process conformance rather than value delivered.

Organizations don’t need a heavier checklist or a repackaged legacy standard. They need a new generation of maturity models that are designed for digital work: lightweight, modular, outcome‑focused, and future‑ready.

If consultants want to remain relevant, we must stop selling comfort and start enabling change. Let go of outdated models that reward compliance over progress and build frameworks that help organizations learn faster, scale smarter, and compete on speed and adaptability.

Digital evolution isn’t waiting. The organizations that win will adapt quickly, learn relentlessly, and measure success by outcomes—not by compliance. CMMI had its moment. Its time has passed. Continuing to sell it as the standard of maturity in a digital world is not just outdated—it’s irresponsible.

Consultants and advisors must choose: defend what’s safe and familiar, or lead with models that actually enable digital transformation. If digital is the future, then CMMI is the past. Stop dragging the past into tomorrow’s work.