Maturity Assessment for a Data Governance Maturity Model

there are six steps to follow in order to make the most use of a data governance maturity model while avoiding its pitfalls the following lesson covers the second step that of performing the assessment to identify what level of maturity your organization lies on for the chosen data governance maturity model this is one of the lessons that is covered in the data governance maturity model online course that is available right now the course offers much more than the details of these six steps it covers the basics the concepts the characteristics and the benefits of maturity models it provides an overview of plenty of data governance mature models and data management maturity models it covers the shortcomings and downsides of a data governance maturity model and ways to navigate around them plus lessons learned from organizations that are using them as a bonus I'll also provide an overview of other data maturity models such as data analytics data links and much more if you want to learn all there is to know about data governance maturity models in order to establish or to improve your data governance program I'll post a link to the online course in the video description below without further ado here is a lesson on how to perform the assessment to identify what level of maturity your organization lies for the chosen data governance maturity model for the assessment step I like to split into three parts gathering the information performing the assessment and visualizing the results let's start with the first part in order to perform the assessment you need to start gathering some information I first recommend to identify the leads who are responsible for each domain or subject area of the maturity model explain to these leads why do organization is implementing maturity modeling what the expected outcomes are and how their input is invaluable to the efforts success generally speaking I think the leads responsible for subject areas are very receptive to my surely modeling why because unlike an audit a maturity model is a resource that allows staff to advocate their needs and to say well these are the resources that I need in order to achieve successful data governance or the model says that we need to classify our data so that needs to be on my work plan this year in turn these leads could help you identify other stakeholders that need to be consulted in order for you to perform an evaluation of your Aza's state depending on your organization and the level of data governance maturity that you have these stakeholders could include the data governance council members data stewards from different areas of the business data custodians our IT professionals such as the architects database administrators privacy and security officers software and web developers data analysts and business intelligence professionals and so on it can definitely be a hefty long list depending on the maturity model chosen looking to stakeholders for the domains that you need to perform an assessment for and then gather their input through a series of one-on-one interviews or focus groups surveys and so on this can definitely also be a hefty effort that's one of the reasons why some companies hire consultancy to do this work for them which is part of that consultancies package that I mentioned before if that's the option that he go for I recommend to also ask for the raw information back the raw data that was gathered and I just have the end results of the survey presented to you why because I think it's worth reviewing it because even though consultants could come in with years of experience working in similar companies or in the same industry there could also be nuances of your own environment that might be misunderstood or misinterpreted from those that are not immersed into it the other side of the coin is that a consultancy or vendor whatever the external party is that you hire they also bring objectivity to the process and within your organization you're probably also going to find arenas assumptions you're also going to find differing opinions about one is to be improved and bias regarding who is responsible for the improvements an objective third party can help navigate these assumptions opinions and biases just be aware that most vendors will push their own maturity model because their models usually require or suggest organizations to buy the vendors software while most vendor software is good for advancing the maturity you want to make sure that the model you're using fits the business objectives that you have and as I mentioned before it is affordable so don't lose sight of that consideration that we mentioned in the previous lesson besides gathering and eliciting your stakeholders you shall also start gathering and going through various documentation and artifacts such as data models there are dictionaries the business glossary procedure manuals standards and policies and so on you don't need to go into a lot of details here sometimes just the existence of some of these artifacts will give you the insights on what maturity level your organization is at and you can simply start by creating an inventory of these artifacts do you have a data governance terms of reference check do you have a business glossary check do you have a data quality standards and if so what domains do they cover etc etc and at the same time the lack of certain documentation and artifacts will also give you a similar indication of your asses situation now with the information gathered it's time to complete the second part of the assessment step and that is conducting that assessment and there are a few ways of doing it the most common way is to really fill out a survey the complexity of the questionnaire the survey the granularity of the questions in the time and effort that you need to put into it varies I want to show you this one example and this is an older example from Kalidas data governance maturity assessment now I will also link to it in the section below if you're curious and filling it out but let's quickly go over it now so let's fill that out I think we need to provide our that information will do that now sometimes in the beginning of the survey they would ask more information about your company so they will know how to market to you later on so is this information it's not as necessary for the maturing model but also again the other side of the coin is that sometimes they can use this information to be able to measure your results against similar organizations now this survey can be a little bit simplistic so they're not going to be too many questions to go through and I believe they actually have four sections that they're asking because that's what their domains are they're four different ones and they're just asking six questions each again I'll post a link below to see if you're curious and filling it out unfortunately it seems to be an old version of this assessment so it's no longer being maintained by them so you'll not receive a custom report as a survey promises but really it only takes about 15 minutes to fill out so it's not a big time commitment and just in case you like to go over the questions that they ask now as you're filling this out you might notice that the answers for each question corresponds to their four maturity levels so this one in particular is a very simplistic survey as I mentioned but I wanted to provide you with a real-life example that I'm allowed to share with you as to what you might expect from a survey type maturity assessment you need to be aware of a couple of things the questions and the provider options can sometimes be interpreted for example in the question for what is the process for resolving data issues this third option right here can be a bit unclear issues are recorded is that all data issues or is that some data issues now I would interpret it that it refers to most issues or at least 80% of the issues but someone else might interpret it as any issues and you know what it's good enough that you have a process in place to record them so then they select this third option is your answer the takeaway here is to try and achieve Consensus chief consensus from the domain leads or the stakeholders identify in the previous part as to how you're interpreting the questions and the choices whatever the interpretation ends up being make sure you document it it's important to do that in case you leave and someone else takes over or if you're comparing your results with another company that went through the same process it's good to confirm your interpretations with them this also comes in handy when you do the reassessment that we'll go over later now the other method is to work with a vendor or a consultancy third-party to create that assessment for you and I think I've covered that a little bit already and the last method is applicable for those maturity models that don't provide a survey type assessment tool and they really only provide a descriptive the narrative such as the one that we see here in this example from the Stanford's data governance maturity model here we are going to go over the described characteristics and then we correlate that with our own environment but here too we need to be aware there is room for interpretation in the Stanford example here what is a significant portion of targeted audience mean good question so a lot of the assessment itself can be subjective and depending on who fills it out you might get different results this is also because it is mostly qualitative measurements that are being offered now lastly the third part of the assessment is to visualize your results in this example that we're seeing is from Stanford again and the first thing that we see is this tabular format on the Left that is where we're plugging in our scores obtained by our self assessment or the survey or the third-party and so on and we see where we stand by averaging out the scores for each domain or subject area that we measured in this example we are at a level two data governance maturity but what's also helpful is that we can see how we score for each of the areas each of the domains each of the subject areas this is a great indicator as to where we might need to put in a bit more effort to improve we can also see how our scores chart against a goal and in some instances we could even see where we are in comparison to our peers or our industry's average but to be honest those last two have only seen them from vendors and from consultancies now lastly we can see a similar result that is represented here by the spire chart and I think I mentioned in the maturity models characteristics lesson that I find a lot of data governance practitioners are fond of it so maybe you are too maybe you'll start using this one as well and that concludes the assessment step you

Channel: Lights OnData

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Keywords: maturity assessment, lightsondata, lights on data, data, maturity assessment model, maturity assessment framework, data maturity assessment, maturity assessment modle, assessment for data governance maturity model, data governance maturity model, data maturity model, assessment steps for maturity model, proccess maturity assessment, process maturity assessment

Id: FFTN2x8KRY4

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020