Margaret Hambleton (margaret@hambletoncompliance.com) is President of Hambleton Compliance, LLC in Valencia, CA.

Back in the 1980s, Carnegie Mellon developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for the U.S. Defense Department. The model, or versions of the model, have been widely used in many industries and professions, including, to a limited extent, compliance. Maturity is defined as the degree to which an organization’s processes have been formalized, implemented, and integrated into an organization’s operations. Typically, maturity models use 3–5 tiers to define how mature a program is. At the lowest levels, the program/process is ad-hoc and fragmented. At the highest levels, the program is well incorporated into the organization’s strategy and optimized to predict and prevent failures.