What are Data Maturity models? : An extensive guide

Data is one of the most valuable assets today, and you must harness its full potential. Many companies struggle to become data-driven and undermine the need for improving data quality. The repercussions of having outdated datasets and the absence of data management and governance processes can hinder the success of your business.

Data maturity models are pivotal in addressing data quality and security issues. The model can be your comprehensive guide for building a sound business strategy and positioning yourself as a leader in the industry. You can also avoid compliance violations by addressing data breaches and lapses in the organizational processes.

This article will take you through data maturity models: what they are, how these models are beneficial, and how you can improve your governance, management, and data analytics processes.

What is Data Maturity? 

Data maturity is a key measure that illustrates how well your organization optimally utilizes its data resources. Your company can achieve a high level of data maturity when you and your stakeholders can effectively and responsibly use qualitative and quantitative data.

The essence of data maturity lies in comprehensively integrating and leveraging data for decision-making. All team members must derive insights from different data types to holistically understand consumer behavior and emerging trends that can significantly impact your business.

What is Data Governance and How does it Align with Data Maturity?

Data governance is a systematic approach to identifying and safeguarding your organization’s data to ensure data quality and accuracy. This practice involves implementing policies and standards to establish a robust foundation for secure and readily available data. Data governance practices serve as a guiding framework for maintaining high-quality data throughout the lifecycle of a project. 

The aim of data maturity and data governance is to help you extract maximum value from the data to achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Since the objective can be achieved in different ways, let’s look at what data maturity models are and how they promote proper management and governance of vital data.

What are Data Maturity Models?

A data governance maturity model is a crucial tool that helps you evaluate the current state of your data governance and management processes. The model can serve as a framework, outlining procedures to store, maintain, and dispose of business data in the correct manner. 

With data maturity models, you can gauge the level at which your data analytics capabilities are utilized and develop strategies to enhance overall data quality and governance. Since there is diversity in data governance and management across organizations, various types of data maturity models exist. Each model can be tailored to suit different organizational goals, benchmarks, and data user needs. Take a look at how data maturity and governance models can be created.

Creating a Data Governance Maturity Model

Every organization needs to have some maturity assessment techniques to determine if the governance models are a good fit for the business. To create a robust data maturity and governance model, you need to have a data governance strategy in place. It will define data-driven initiatives, benchmarks for growth, regulatory requirements, and critical industry standards that you must adhere to. 

The data management and maturity model cannot be built without consulting the entire organization. You should commence by assessing the current state of data quality and involve all the stakeholders. Through questionnaires, surveys, and analysis, identify all the gaps, address the shortcomings, and align your data governance programs with the industry’s best practices.

If you do not have a data maturity model for your organization or you wish to update an existing one, you can explore some popular models available. 

Popular Data Models

Although there are quite a few data governance maturity models, let’s understand two of the most prominent ones. Each organization is different, and one particular model is not always the best fit for business. However, referring to these models can serve as a guide to build and improve your data quality and maturity models.

Gartner Data Governance Maturity Model

Presented first in 2008, the Gartner Data Governance Maturity Model is one of the most detailed frameworks today. This model outlines five levels of data maturity for business organizations to achieve optimal utilization of their data. Before looking at the five levels of progression, you must know that there is a level 0, too. Level 0 signifies complete unawareness in using and managing data systems.

• Level 1: Aware: The first stage is where you have a basic acknowledgment of the data your business generates. However, the data utilization in the organization is minimal.
• Level 2: Reactive: In this stage, you engage with the data and gradually distribute datasets across your teams and stakeholders to improve performance.
• Level 3: Proactive: In the third stage, you proactively use data analysis and management systems to enhance the quality of your products or services.
• Level 4: Managed: In this stage, you outline well-defined policies for maximizing data usage and security.
• Level 5: Effective: The final stage is when your organization has peak efficiency in handling vast volumes of data, managing user access controls, and aligning data policies with best practices.

From the initial stage of being unaware to the final stage of reaching data maturity, this model has detailed characteristics and insights at every stage. The Gartner Data Governance Maturity Model can be a guide for your organization to understand and implement data governance, analytics, and management policies.

The Dell Maturity Model

The Dell Maturity Model is widely used by several organizations across industries to achieve competitive advantage through data utilization. This model has four levels that help you assess your business’s proficiency in handling data.

• Level 1: Data Aware: The first stage involves having basic awareness and interaction with the business data, using a few tools to improve overall efficiency.
• Level 2: Data Proficient: In the second stage, you actively promote data literacy within the organization and introduce automation techniques for processing data.
• Level 3: Data Savvy: In the third stage, you become more data-driven by utilizing business data to create strategic long-term goals. You are comfortable with using insights generated from data analytics and business intelligence tools to work towards your objectives.
• Level 4: Data Driven: The final stage shows that you have reached the pinnacle of steering data-driven decisions throughout your organization. Your internal standards are in accordance with industry benchmarks, and you clearly understand data ownership, security, and accountability.

The Dell Maturity Model is easy to follow because it provides a pathway to extract value from business data for better data governance. You can use this tool to plan your business objectives for each stage and slowly ascend to the top.

Benefits of Data Maturity Models

The three major benefits that data maturity models provide your organization include:

• Fosters Data-Driven Decision-Making: Encouraging the use of data maturity models will empower all employees of your organization to make more informed decisions. You can identify areas of strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth with the maturity model. The specific chosen model can help you improve plans, tailor strategies, and boost overall career development and productivity.
  
• Data Protection: A strong data governance maturity plan will guide you about your data landscape. You will know what type of data you have, where it is stored, how it is processed, and more. This comprehensive understanding will help you build robust data protection measures. The transparency facilitated by data governance models will take you towards aligning your data security measures with industry best practices.
  
• Improved Data Analysis: Data maturity models and data analytics go hand-in-hand. Developing cutting-edge data operations allows you to move beyond routine tasks and analyze real-time information. You will be able to create a skilled data team that uses custom predictive models and forecasting tools to achieve the best results in the industry.

Improve Your Data Analytics and Maturity Models with Airbyte

Since data maturity models are partly responsible for driving your data analytics processes, it is imperative that your datasets are consolidated and always kept up-to-date. Any changes made in the dataset must be captured timely and aligned with the latest business strategy promptly. If you have vast amounts of data from multiple sources, it is best to consider loading it into data integration and replication platforms like Airbyte.

Airbyte allows you to consolidate all your data from various sources and load it onto a cloud data warehouse or databases of your choice. It has an extensive catalog of pre-built connectors and helps you set up a sound data pipeline within a few minutes! Thus, you can move your data to a secure destination and comprehensively understand how to improve your data maturity and governance model by analyzing the latest trends.

The Final Word

These days, every business deals with different data types. It can encompass personal details of customers or metadata that offer valuable insights into consumer habits and preferences. A data maturity model provides you with a roadmap for ensuring better quality and management of data. 

You can also create data analytics maturity models to help you customize your offerings based on your findings to increase customer retention. An important thing to remember before creating such models is ensuring that your data’s integrity and accuracy is maintained throughout the process. Data maturity and governance models can only contribute well to analytical processes when you can collect and disseminate accurate information across the organization.

To fulfill this prerequisite, you can integrate your data with Airbyte and establish a robust data pipeline. Sign up with Airbyte today to get started!