We establish the first cross-sector baseline for delivery maturity and identify governance as the binding constraint on performance — independent of technology investment.
1. Governance lags every dimension
Across the sample, governance scored lowest of the four readiness dimensions, and its variance was the widest.1 Organisations in the top decile were distinguished less by their tooling than by the clarity of their decision rights — who decides, on what evidence, and when.
The implication is structural: investments in technology without a corresponding reform of governance produced no measurable gain in maturity.
These findings hold across sectors and procurement models, suggesting the constraint is institutional rather than technical.
1 Governance index, σ = 0.21 across the sample. See Appendix B for the full instrument.