AMS Maturity Levels: From Firefighting to Decision Platform

{
  "id": "ams-048",
  "title": "AMS Maturity Levels: From Firefighting to Decision Platform",
  "hook": "Most SAP AMS teams believe they are mature because systems are running. Real maturity starts when the system improves itself.",
  "idea": "AMS maturity is not about tools or headcount. It’s about how reliably the organization turns incidents and changes into stability, learning, and lower cost.",
  "core_principle": "Each level is defined by dominant behavior and control loops — not by intentions.",
  "maturity_levels": [
    {
      "level": 1,
      "name": "Firefighting AMS",
      "identity": "We react",
      "dominant_behavior": [
        "Incidents drive all work",
        "Heroes and experts keep the system alive",
        "Urgency replaces prioritization"
      ],
      "typical_signs": [
        "High repeat incident rate",
        "Emergency access is common",
        "No clear ownership under pressure",
        "Backlog is chaotic or ignored"
      ],
      "cost_profile": "Unbounded and rising",
      "risk_profile": "High and poorly understood",
      "what_is_missing": [
        "Prevention",
        "Evidence-based decisions",
        "Stable change process"
      ]
    },
    {
      "level": 2,
      "name": "Controlled Operations AMS",
      "identity": "We control",
      "dominant_behavior": [
        "Incidents and changes are managed via process",
        "SLA discipline exists",
        "Roles and approvals are defined"
      ],
      "typical_signs": [
        "Lower chaos, but repeats still exist",
        "Changes feel slow and bureaucratic",
        "Prevention is discussed but rarely funded",
        "Knowledge exists but is document-heavy"
      ],
      "cost_profile": "High but predictable",
      "risk_profile": "Moderate but reactive",
      "ceiling": "Process without learning plateaus here"
    },
    {
      "level": 3,
      "name": "Prevention-Driven AMS",
      "identity": "We eliminate",
      "dominant_behavior": [
        "Repeat incidents trigger Problems automatically",
        "Capacity is reserved for elimination",
        "Demand drivers are measured and reduced"
      ],
      "typical_signs": [
        "Repeat rate trends down",
        "Problems have owners and ROI logic",
        "Training targets real incident families",
        "Backlog hygiene is enforced"
      ],
      "cost_profile": "Stabilizing and slowly declining",
      "risk_profile": "Managed and visible",
      "key_shift": "From activity to impact"
    },
    {
      "level": 4,
      "name": "Automation & Agentic AMS",
      "identity": "We scale",
      "dominant_behavior": [
        "Knowledge is structured and reusable",
        "Automation removes manual work systematically",
        "Agents assist triage, diagnosis, and decisions"
      ],
      "typical_signs": [
        "Standard changes dominate",
        "Experts are amplified, not overloaded",
        "RAG answers work reliably",
        "Onboarding time drops sharply"
      ],
      "cost_profile": "Declining",
      "risk_profile": "Contained and forecastable",
      "key_asset": "Reusable operational intelligence"
    },
    {
      "level": 5,
      "name": "Decision Platform AMS",
      "identity": "We guide",
      "dominant_behavior": [
        "AMS frames business and IT decisions",
        "Options are compared with impact, cost, and risk",
        "System boundaries and lock-in are managed intentionally"
      ],
      "typical_signs": [
        "AMS involved before changes are requested",
        "Fewer urgent requests over time",
        "Clear stop-doing lists exist",
        "AMS influences architecture and strategy"
      ],
      "cost_profile": "Optimized and defensible",
      "risk_profile": "Strategically controlled",
      "strategic_value": "AMS becomes a competitive advantage"
    }
  ],
  "transition_rules": [
    "You cannot skip levels — behavior must change first.",
    "Tooling alone never moves maturity.",
    "Each level requires killing specific anti-patterns.",
    "Progress is measured by trends, not milestones."
  ],
  "diagnostic_questions": [
    "Do repeat incidents automatically trigger elimination work?",
    "Is prevention capacity protected under pressure?",
    "Can knowledge be retrieved and reused under stress?",
    "Are decisions documented with options and outcomes?",
    "Does AMS reduce future dependency, or reinforce it?"
  ],
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Assess maturity signals from incident, change, and backlog data.",
      "Highlight behaviors anchoring the team at current level.",
      "Suggest next-level practices with highest leverage."
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "AMS maturity snapshot",
      "Behavior gap list",
      "Next-level transition roadmap"
    ]
  },
  "anti_patterns_to_kill_by_level": {
    "level_1": [
      "Hero culture",
      "Emergency-by-default",
      "No ownership"
    ],
    "level_2": [
      "Process theater",
      "SLA obsession without learning",
      "Document-only knowledge"
    ],
    "level_3": [
      "Underfunded prevention",
      "Problems without ROI",
      "Local optimizations"
    ],
    "level_4": [
      "Automating chaos",
      "Agents without governance",
      "Knowledge without validation"
    ]
  },
  "design_question": [
    "Which behavior keeps your AMS stuck at the current level — and what would it take to block it?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-048.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-048.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "Most SAP AMS teams believe they are mature because systems are running. Real maturity starts when the system improves itself."
  }
}