A county administrator's office is preparing an executive briefing on AI readiness and must choose between benchmarking against a generic industry maturity model or building a custom department-specific scorecard. The briefing's goal is to let executives compare the county's standing against peer organizations. Which approach best fits that goal?

The choice between assessment frameworks should follow from the purpose of the assessment, and here the stated goal is letting executives compare the county's standing against peer organizations. A generic industry maturity model uses shared, standardized stages that other organizations are also scored against, so a county's placement on it is directly comparable to peer counties, cities, or agencies that used the same framework. A custom department scorecard can capture rich, department-specific detail, but that same specificity is what makes it incomparable outside the county; no peer organization is scored on the same scale, so an executive cannot situate the county's result relative to anyone else's. A locally invented scale compounds that problem further, trading external comparability for terminology that makes sense only inside the county. Dropping structured scoring in favor of narrative summary removes the mechanism executives need to benchmark against peers, since a narrative gives no common yardstick. Scope note: a custom scorecard remains valuable for internal department-level tracking; the choice here concerns what serves an executive, peer-comparison briefing. Operational check: confirm the chosen framework has publicly documented stage definitions and that peer organizations' benchmark scores are available for comparison.