An Integrated Self-Assessment Measurement Framework for Digital Readiness, Integration Maturity and Sustainability Orientation in Business Processes

Contemporary enterprises must pursue digitalization while satisfying increasingly formalized expectations of verifiable sustainability performance, and compact diagnostic instruments capable of evaluating these agendas jointly are still scarce. This article develops such an instrument in the form of three composite self-assessment indices: the Digital Transformation Readiness Index (DTRI), the Integration Maturity Index (IMI), and the Sustainability Orientation Index (SOI). Building on research streams in digital transformation, Business Process Management (BPM), intelligent process automation, and ESG governance, we position the three indices within an explicit conceptual framework—grounded in dynamic capabilities and socio-technical reasoning—in which the DTRI represents enabling conditions, the IMI the process-level transmission mechanism, and the SOI the directional governance layer. Each index aggregates several subdimensions—captured through Likert-scale survey items and ordinal maturity checklists—into an interpretable score on a 0–100 scale. The construction procedure adheres to established methodological guidance for composite indicators, documenting the instrument development pathway from literature-derived construct definitions through item generation to refinement, and making the unit of analysis, normalization, and equal-weighting choices explicit. The paper is positioned explicitly as an instrument-development protocol rather than as an already validated measurement model. It reports the complete pre-validation specification of all three instruments—full item inventories, the exact normalization and aggregation rules, and interpretive maturity bands—with the complete batteries, scoring keys and anchor rubrics, and it sets out a validation protocol that separates reflective from formative levels of measurement, specifies the multilevel procedures required by the cross-level propositions, and covers content validity, reliability, discriminant validity, weighting sensitivity and common method bias. By treating digitalization and sustainability as a single measurement problem observed on the same organization at the same time, the framework also responds to the operationalization gap identified in the twin transition literature. The framework is presented as a theoretically anchored measurement proposal whose empirical validation constitutes the immediate next research step. On that basis it offers scholars and practitioners a coherent starting point for gauging an organization’s capacity to coordinate digital transformation, orchestrated automation, and sustainability governance within a single assessment exercise.