Abstract

Sustainable mining operations depends on external and internal factors. Externally, the most notable factors include a socio-economic and political environment, availability and support of technology, the physical environment, and legislation. Internally, a system is not only designed to meet these external requirements, but also to meet organizational goals and objectives in an efficacious manner. The ability to define a performability framework for sustainable, cost-effective mining operations depends on the availability of benchmarked measures of effectiveness. Such a framework may be defined using Capability Maturity (CM) to address external and internal business requirements in an integrated way. A good CM framework utilizes the holistic advantages of a systems approach to characterize operations inside a unique environment. At its core lies a set of grounded (so to speak) business and operations processes that align with the wider business strategy. Apart from core business processes, a good CM framework additionally provides practice areas as one will find in the CMMI™ V2.0 maturity model. Such a framework may be adapted to meet the characteristics found in mining, which will allow business to assess its own maturity in a quantitative manner. This, in turn, allows improvement and comparison with peers in industry and ultimately provides visibility and elimination of blind spots. One important, and critical, advantage of utilizing a good maturity model is that it provides overall governance and oversight.