Mature data

Data Maturity Assessments. A waste of time or massively valuable?

Whatever your answer, you'll need to deal with the "common sense" view…

It's a view that has some logic to it.

• Assessing data maturity requires (if you're doing it properly) significant resources. Not just the person carrying out the assessment and writing it up, but also consider that your colleagues have to take time away from their day jobs to provide the information that you need.

• Whilst your working on data maturity, you're not making the data any better.

• When you report that the firm isn't very data mature, no one values the insight because as above, they already know that they're not doing much!

Let's follow this through. Our firm has identified a need to improve its data quality and brought in some help to get this done.

The experts start by talking to the business stakeholders to understand the significant pain points and proceed to roll out an MVP data governance framework.

A few months in, and:

• We have some assigned data owners and data stewards;

• A basic business glossary is in place;

• A high level data lineage is recorded; and

• We've got a tracker for data issues

Then ExCo want an update on the data management project.

This should be a great opportunity for the Head of Data. Real progress has been made. Data quality is not yet massively improved, but the data governance is active and the data improvements are going to come.

So why does our fictional Head of Data find it so hard to give a meaningful project update to ExCo?

The answer is that they are unable to articulate the progress and improvements, other than anecdotally. Quantitative assessments are missing.

In the absence of meaningful metrics that can demonstrate improvement, you are nothing more than a cost centre incurring more costs.

So maybe you've now switched sides and think that the Data Maturity Assessment is invaluable.

What does this look like?

You need something which is not too heavy, but not trivial either.

This will be the subject of an upcoming blog.

New to the Datazed of Data Governance, or was it forwarded to you?

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Come and meet me - in person or online

• Insurance Data Governance & Data Quality Get Together - Data Dictionaries, Data Directories and Business Glossaries

  • Thursday 23 February, In Person (London EC3).

  • Practitioners should register here and vendors interested in sponsorship should hit reply and email me.

• Data and the CRO - an interactive discussion with some Chief Risk Officers to discuss the interactions between data teams and risk teams.

  • Thursday 16 March, Online

  • Open to all - register here. Sponsorship opportunities available.

• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - What to do When Data Governance Has Been Binned

  • Tuesday 9 10 May at IRM UK's Master Data Management and Data Governance Conference Europe.

  • I'll be at the conference on Tuesday 9th and Wednesday 10th.

Are there any other events that you think I should attend or be speaking at? Let me know!

The Datazed of Data Governance training course

There are plenty of courses out there that will teach you about Data Governance, but they generally focus on theory, and some will help you with implementation skills.

Similarly, there are some one or two day courses out there which give you lots of information, then you are back at work and buried in the day job.

What I want to do is to train and advise you over several weeks. We'll go all the way from what you do when you start in the role, through to understanding your aims and objectives; delivering them; and then looking how you can develop your function/team and ultimately advance personally and professionally.

Of course we'll also cover the Data Governance theory as well.

I want to do this across a series (probably eight) sessions online, with interactive discussion. For the ones you can't make, recordings will be available.

Finally, there'll be a group set up for each cohort to connect during and beyond the course.

Interested? Click below to join the priority list.

Have a wonderful week,Charles