Jan 2015 | Marketing Solutions

A core theme discussed at our Data Quality Summit in October was maturity

A particular focus was strategy maturity around data management and data quality practices. This discussion is the result of a shift in both language and intent from the data custodians that we’ve engaged with over the last few years and highlights the importance organisations are placing on making their data fit for purpose.

When talking with the attendees at our event it was clear that they had a wide array of key drivers for addressing data quality maturity and although “maturity” offered a converging theme they were tackling it for very different reasons. Some were delivering or looking to deliver customer care programmes and wanted accurate and trusted data to form the bedrock of their customer promises on service and delivery, others were tackling regulatory obligations and needed to formalise their governance procedures. A few were just starting out on the data quality journey and were looking for some guidance and direction on how to gain senior buy-in.

And yet, the common desire across all the attendees was to be able to quantify the maturity of their data quality strategy in order to inform their improvement roadmap and plan their next steps.

There are plenty of data quality maturity curves out there in the market (you can see ours below or you can google ‘data quality maturity curve’). But, we’ve noticed there’s not a huge amount of context around how they work and how they can help your organisation. So, we’ve created a simple assessment that combines the ability to plot your organisation’s data quality maturity on our curve with practical advice around moving your data quality strategy forward.

Our curve has four easy to understand stages, Unaware, Reactive, Proactive and Optimised & Governed, that span the full lifecycle of a data quality strategy. Your stage is defined by a scoring system driven by the results of question answers in the improvement assessment itself that relate to People, Processes and Technology within your business.

By completing the assessment you can gain real-time understanding of the maturity of your data quality strategy and how it relates to the people, processes and technology present within your organisation. You will also be able to download some useful reading in the form of market reviews, technology briefings and analyst interpretations, and finally, we provide a short list of recommendations of what you should be thinking of next when guiding your strategy.

Hopefully, you will find the results of your assessment insightful and of course, we welcome any feedback on the assessment itself.

Take our data quality improvement assessment