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It has been noted that many of the promises of information technology (IT) have not been realized and the "productivity paradox" has seriously questioned IT investments in organizations (Brynjolfsson, 1993). It is argued here that many such failures are due to simplistic ideas about organizational development and behaviour. The change processes are dynamic and emergent in nature. Therefore, a theoretically more grounded understanding of information technology, organizations and business process change management is needed, as noted recently by Kettinger & Grover (1995).Organizational change is usually initiated by strategic investments such as IT (Davenport, 1993). However, the ultimate value of IT/IS strategic efforts is quite impossible to achieve unless we harness the learning capacity and ability to share knowledge and views inside the organization. For example, evidence from the IS strategy research field states that implementation of IT/IS strategies is quite heavily related to human resources and organizational learning Sethi 1988, Earl 1993).The question is how to investigate the holistic entity of an organization when trying to change its direction. It is clear that in IS research many of the technological options are well discussed. However, when we are dealing with vaguer issues, such as user and managerial abilities, our "nice picture" becomes more messy. Constructive, coordinated and longitudinal observation of organizations is very laborious, takes time and radically increases research costs. Therefore, tools are needed to structure and focus the research process.Here, a conceptual framework -IS-related organizational maturity -is presented as one of the promising guidelines for studying organizational IS-related change. The framework is based on learning and diffusion theories (Auer, 1995) and offers views to evaluate both the current organizational stance and its potential for change. The components of the maturity framework are usage, management and IT. The prerequisite for a smooth organization change is that the components are in balance in their organizational context.The use of the IS-related organizational maturity model is illustrated here with two mini-cases from the Finnish foodstuffs and retailing industries. The objective of this paper is to motivate and describe i) how to use the framework and -more importantly -ii) how to focus on certain attributes of each