2023

TDWI
Data Management
Maturity Model
Assessment Guide

By Deanne Larson, Ph.D.

TDWI RESEARCH

2023

TDWI Data Management Table of Contents

Foreword from the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Maturity Model
Value of the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Assessment Guide Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Trends Impacting Data Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
TDWI Data Management Maturity Model: The Context
for Assessment Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Model Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Stages of Maturity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Overview of Stages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Stage 1: Nascent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Stage 2: Developing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Stage 3: Established . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Stage 4: Managed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Stage 5: Optimized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Getting from Here to There . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Evaluating Assessment Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Scoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

© 2023 by TDWI, a division of 1105 Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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TDWI Data Management Maturity Model Assessment Guide

About the Author

DEANNE LARSON, PH.D., is an active data science practitioner and academic. Her research has focused on
enterprise data strategy, agile analytics, and data science best practices. She holds Project Management
Professional (PMP), Project Management Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Certified Business
Intelligence Professional (CBIP), and Six Sigma certifications. Deanne attended AT&T Executive
Training at the Harvard Business School focusing on IT leadership, Stanford University focusing on
data science, and New York University focusing on business analytics. She has presented at multiple
conferences including TDWI, TDWI Europe, IRM UK, PMI, and other academic conferences. She
is principal faculty at City University of Seattle, has consulted for several Fortune 500 companies, and
has authored multiple research articles on data science methodology and best practices.

About TDWI Research

TDWI Research provides research and advice for data professionals worldwide. TDWI Research
focuses exclusively on data management and analytics issues and teams up with industry thought
leaders and practitioners to deliver both broad and deep understanding of the business and technical
challenges surrounding the deployment and use of data management and analytics solutions. TDWI
Research offers in-depth research reports, commentary, inquiry services, and topical conferences as
well as strategic planning services to user and vendor organizations.

2  TDWI RESEARCH
 Foreword

Foreword from the Author

Today, more organizations are expanding their data and analytics strategy to larger audiences across
the enterprise. Fueled by trends in self-service analytics, advancements in analytics technologies,
and the ongoing need to stay ahead of the competition, enterprises are democratizing data access
and moving toward data-driven decision-making at every level and function of the business. This
trend is reflected in TDWI research, which shows that self-service ranks at the top of organizational
priorities, with more advanced analytics, such as machine learning, not far behind.
To support this expansion, organizations need to focus on improving their data management as it
is the foundation of data-driven decision-making. Data management establishes the components
necessary to derive value from data assets. The right culture, resources, architecture, data life cycle
management, and governance practices are needed to make data understandable and usable and
to foster analytics. Without this foundation, building advanced capabilities with analytics and
machine learning is not possible.
Data management is critical for the success of expanding BI and analytics programs. That’s why
TDWI created the Data Management Maturity Model and Assessment—to help organizations
understand the maturity of their data management efforts and determine what steps they must take to
improve and expand their data management work. The focus of the assessment is on the organization
as a whole as opposed to the individual, although we do ask questions about individual skills.

Value of the Model

The Data Management Maturity Model can help guide organizations on their data management
journey. It provides a framework for companies to understand where they are, where they’ve been,
and where they still need to go to support strong data management. The model can also provide
guidance for companies at the beginning of their data management journey by helping them
understand best practices used by companies that are more mature.
An important feature of the Data Management Maturity Model is the interactive assessment. (You
can take the assessment at https://tdwi.org/pages/assessments/diq-all-data-management-maturity-
model-assessment.) This TDWI Guide is designed to help you understand the phases of maturity in
data management as well as help you interpret your scores. We trust you will find it useful.

Deanne Larson, Ph.D., DM, CBIP

President, Larson & Associates

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TDWI Data Management Maturity Model Assessment Guide

Introduction
Data and analytics are the focus of organizations as they work to become more competitive. TDWI
research finds overwhelming agreement from enterprises that they will need to undergo some sort of
digital transformation to compete in the future. With this new emphasis on data comes an increased
need to manage it; that management is required in order to leverage data and analytics for value. It
enables companies to understand, integrate, access, and protect their data in order to get the most
benefit from it.

Trends Impacting Data Management

There are several interwoven technology and organizational trends driving the need for increased
data management competency. A few important ones include:
DATA FABRIC. Given data management’s complexity, some organizations now rely on a data fabric
to simplify data asset use. A data fabric leverages analytics that uses discoverable and inferenced
metadata to improve and simplify data management tasks. Tasks include designing and deploying
new data assets and identifying which data objects are integrated and reusable. A data fabric can
identify, integrate, and deliver data based on classification, patterns, and who uses the data. The
resulting metadata analysis is then leveraged to provide common data access for data consumers. A
data fabric can identify the data assets best suited for use cases and can be deployed across existing
platforms in an organization. With diverse data ecosystems, increased competency in foundational
data management can enable a successful data fabric implementation.
DIVERSE DATA TYPES. As organizations strive to gain greater value from analytics, they often begin
to enrich their data—combining company data with diverse data from other systems or third-party
data sources. Enterprises are examining how they can utilize data beyond the traditional structured
data associated with business applications built on relational databases. Such semistructured or
unstructured data could be found in trouble tickets or claims reports originating as paper documents
or XML or JSON documents. Other useful data might come from machine data generated by
Internet of Things (IoT) devices or from log files or key-value structures. Enterprises may also wish to
incorporate external data such as demographics or geospatial data; some cloud providers offer third-
party data such as weather data or industry-specific data for analysis. The point is that many of these
data types are becoming mainstream. Organizations are storing this data in data lakes (and often in
the cloud—see next trend).
HYBRID CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS. As organizations advance their analytics, they often find that their
traditional on-premises data warehouse and data storage architecture are no longer sufficient to meet
their needs. Many are moving data and analytics to the cloud—and often to more than one cloud
provider—to take advantage of its seemingly limitless data storage and for its computing power. At
TDWI, we see that both data warehouses and data lakes in the cloud have become mainstream.
However, organizations that rapidly migrate to the cloud without a plan risk creating an environment
too complex to manage or govern effectively. The more diverse the technical ecosystem becomes, the
stronger the need for mature data management.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND OTHER MODERN ANALYTICS. The demand for artificial intelligence
(AI) technologies such as machine learning (ML) is growing. Machine learning is fueling new use
cases such as image classification and diagnostics. With AI/ML, organizations are building analytics
products (such as predictive maintenance or next best offer) into BI dashboards and operational
systems. Without the foundation of strong data management in place, modern analytics applications

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 Introduction

are not possible. To build analytics products, data must be understood, consistent, and available.
Data management maturity is critical for implementing advanced technologies such as AI and ML.
AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE. A recent trend is to embed advanced analytics such as machine learning
or natural language processing (NLP) into software products in order to help intelligently automate
certain functionality. In other words, AI technologies are infused into the software. These kinds of
tools are being used across the data and analytics life cycle. For instance, on the data front, some tools
help to automatically classify sensitive data. Other tools help to automate data profiling and cleansing.

TDWI Data Management Maturity Model: The

Context for Assessment Scores
For an organization to become data-driven requires managing, leveraging, and governing all
relevant internal and external data sources for analysis—the very essence of data management.
Enterprises must develop a culture where employees at every level believe in the power of data. Data
management maturity is not simply about having the right functions; it involves organizational,
resource, architecture, data life cycle, and governance components.

Model Dimensions

Figure 1. TDWI Data Management Maturity Model dimensions.

The TDWI Data Management Maturity Model assessment has about 75 questions across the five
categories that form the dimensions of the TDWI Data Management Maturity Model (see Figure 1).
These dimensions are:
ORGANIZATION. Organizational components are essential to data management maturity. Each
component directly enables the other dimensions. Are executive stakeholders identified and involved
in a data strategy? What is the data strategy and is it known, communicated, and measurable? How
is the data strategy aligned with the organizational strategy? How is the organizational culture data-
driven and do users understand the value of data assets? How is data literacy part of the strategy?
How does the organization handle horizontal and vertical data assets? Have ethical standards been
applied to data and analytics use?

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RESOURCES. Data management requires funding, talent, skills, and data literacy, and these resources
are foundational components of the maturity model. How is data management funded? How
does the organization grow talent and build skills? How does it organize to execute? Does it have
the talent and skills needed for data management, including data literacy, model building and
deployment, data engineering, and data stewardship? Is the organization struggling to maintain the
data ecosystem? How is data literacy defined, measured, and cultivated?
ARCHITECTURE. Architecture is the framework for the delivery of data assets and includes data
architecture, technical infrastructure, and alignment with business architecture. What kind of data
does the organization use for analysis? Is it high volume, high frequency, or high integrity? Is the
architecture accessible? How is the data integrated? Is the architecture distributed? Does it use cloud
services? Is the architecture coherent? Does the architecture enable data asset sharing and decision-
making? Can the infrastructure handle the growth in users? Can it scale by use case or seasonality?
Can it scale on demand to fit users’ needs? Is it monolithic or microservices based? Does the
architecture support security, privacy, and integrity requirements?
DATA LIFE CYCLE. The data life cycle dimension addresses an organization’s ability to acquire,
store, use, and dispose of data. What is the scope of these data capabilities? How successful is the
organization at delivering and deploying data assets? Can the organization scale its data capabilities?
Are data operations adequate for the organization’s data needs? What kind of metadata management
is in place? Are data assets curated so they can be shared and reused? Is there measurable value in the
use of data and analytics?
GOVERNANCE. How coherent is the company’s data governance strategy in support of data management?
Can the company effectively balance its information use against IT processes and policies? Do business
and IT teams collaborate? Can the organization ensure the proper access and use of data? What
guardrails and controls are in place to ensure that “correct” models are deployed into production? How
are these models tracked? Are the necessary roles defined and filled from both business and IT? Is the
organization utilizing modern tools (such as data catalogs) to help build trusted data assets? Are security
and privacy measures deployed for personally identifiable information (PII) and other data types? How
is data quality managed, measured, and maintained? Are there policies established to maintain data
and analytics ethics? What policies and procedures support data sovereignty? Is AI/ML deployed to
automate data management aspects (e.g., data integration, data cataloging, and data quality)?

Stages of Maturity
The TDWI Data Management Maturity Model consists of five stages: Nascent, Developing,
Established, Managed, and Optimized. As organizations move through these stages, they should
gain greater value from their data assets. Figure 2 illustrates these stages.

Figure 2. Stages of maturity in the TDWI Data Management Maturity Model.

This Guide provides a short overview of each of the stages of the TDWI Data Management Maturity
Model. This description provides a context to use to interpret your scores when you take the assessment.

6  TDWI RESEARCH
 Overview of Stages

Overview of Stages
Stage 1: Nascent

In this early stage, organizations haven’t yet prioritized data as an asset and haven’t identified an
executive stakeholder for data. Strategically, data is used for reporting and performance; however, a
data strategy is not in place. Traditional data management roles and responsibilities (such as database
administrators) are used but likely exist in silos. Organizations use data for operational and tactical
decisions and data is prioritized based on day-to-day needs.
Often architecture is functional, with traditional data repositories such as data marts or a basic data
warehouse. Structured data is the primary focus, and the architecture is disparate where departments
have different platforms to store and use data. The organization may be considering cloud and
architectural modernization. IT factors heavily in project and analytics delivery and likely uses a
waterfall approach. Data governance is primarily IT-driven.
Organizationally, data management does not have a strategic focus. Funding for data management
is siloed and the organizational culture is not data-driven. Data ethics and literacy may be discussed
but are not prioritized.

Stage 2: Developing

As companies start to realize the importance of data, leadership becomes aware of how data
management is critical to being data-driven. In the Developing stage, strategic awareness of data
asset value emerges. Certain data assets become important in making day-to-day decisions; ethical
issues from data use are emerging. Funding starts to become an issue for strategic use of data assets
and targeted investment in data management begins.
Architecture primarily supports structural data, and data volumes increase. The data warehouse is
the center of the data architecture, and leadership starts to think about a data strategy that includes
modernization and enterprise data. IT continues to factor heavily in project and analytics delivery,
and the need for agility arises. The lack of metadata impacts data sharing. The need to deliver data
faster and remove manual processes are priorities. Basic data governance is in place, including access
policies and security, but the organization lacks a cohesive data governance strategy.

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TDWI Data Management Maturity Model Assessment Guide

Stage 3: Established

During the Established stage, data management becomes a priority and the organization begins to
see a return on data asset investment. Executive leadership realizes the value of data management
and establishes a data strategy addressing ethics and the need for data literacy. Collaboration across
silos starts with sharing and reusing data assets. Funding for data management is prioritized, as is
investing in data management talent and education (such as data literacy programs).
Organizational architecture moves toward self-service as the need for analytics increases. The data
warehouse is no longer the center of the architecture and additional platforms—including the
cloud—emerge. Data integration is critical where data pipelines are needed to support growing
data volumes and velocity. Data project delivery is becoming more agile and projects now take into
account data assets used for analytics. The reliance on sharable data is growing, highlighting the
need for metadata and data curation. A data governance team is established to focus on operating in
the cloud; the use of analytics is part of the plan.

Stage 4: Managed

In the Managed stage, a culture around data has taken hold. Here, an organization realizes that data
enables competitive differentiation, and a cohesive data strategy is in place. Data and analytics use
has demonstrated clear and measurable value and executive roles such as a chief data officer exist.
The organizational culture embraces data literacy, and teams collaborate on data curation and project
delivery. Funding for data management is clear and strategic.
The organization’s architecture is multiplatform and often includes the cloud and analytics
platforms. Multiple data types and data of varying freshness are supported. The architecture is
sufficiently scalable and flexible to consistently meet required service levels. Project delivery is agile
and predictable, and the organization is focused on building DevOps and DataOps capabilities.
Analytics is becoming embedded into BI solutions such as dashboards.
Organizations at this stage will have set up data governance policies and controls. A data catalog
captures metadata about information resources, and employees can contribute to this repository
when they develop and share insights. Governance is applied to how data is leveraged in the cloud.

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 Overview of Stages

Stage 5: Optimized

Only a small percentage of organizations are mature, data-driven enterprises. At the Optimized stage,
organizations have a culture of innovation where data drives actions that transform the business.
Executives evangelize and promote the use of data to drive decisions. Individuals at all levels are
using data and analytics and expect decision-making to be supported by data. Data is integrated into
the culture and the impacts of data use are positive and measured. The data management foundation
is embedded in the culture and continuous improvement is enabled through an agile data life cycle
and mature governance practices.
The data-driven organization has deployed a coherent data infrastructure that is fully operational. The
architecture includes the ability to integrate new sources of data for analytics, whether internal or
external, and to automate metadata collection. Employees at all levels can contribute to a data catalog,
which enables people to find, use, comment on, and share data resources and information products.
Data is treated like a product, and data monetization efforts are conducted regularly. Analytics
driven by AI and ML is integrated into BI products such as dashboards and operational systems.
Standards of ethics are fully baked into all data management processes, both formal and informal;
the search for (and elimination of) bias in models is routine.

Getting from Here to There

How do organizations get from the Nascent stage to become Optimized data management
organizations? This requires both organizational and technology strategies. A key component is
culture. Some organizations are lucky; executives are either in place or come on board who want to
make this happen. Having leaders who understand the value of data and the investment needed for
data management is the first important step.
Without leadership predisposed to fostering data management as a priority, the evolution of data
management is harder, but not impossible. It will be necessary to educate leaders about the value of
data management to advance business objectives. Typically, an organization has a data infrastructure
for reporting that can serve as a starting point from which to build out data management capabilities.
The key is to have both business and IT involved so efforts are directed at solving clearly defined
business needs. In this way, progress results in visible impact, and leadership begins to see the
importance of data management. Successful projects will be the small wins that contribute to a data-
driven culture.
A strong data foundation (including organizational, resource, and architectural dimensions) enables
more sophisticated capabilities. With a culture that recognizes the value of data assets, funding in
place, investment in talent and skills, and data literacy building, organizations are poised to move
to the next maturity levels. Architectures that scale, perform well, support automation, and enable
advanced analytics capabilities establish a solid foundation for growth.

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TDWI Data Management Maturity Model Assessment Guide

The data life cycle focuses on project and analytics delivery and is also key to data management
maturity. Sharable, reusable, consistent, high-quality data assets are essential to data management
execution and evolution. Data curation and industrialization (such as the execution of data pipelines)
contribute to easier execution and advancement through the data management maturity stages.
Governance is also important to execution and evolution. Governance determines the policies, processes,
and tools that make data usable and valuable. Governance handles the foundation for security, privacy,
and compliance, but also advanced challenges such as data ethics and sovereignty in the cloud. Start
with the foundational aspects of governance, and as the culture grows to be more data-driven, expand
the governance capabilities to align with the expansion of the architecture and data life cycle.

Evaluating Assessment Scores

The TDWI Data Management Maturity Assessment has about 75 questions across the five categories
that form the dimensions of the TDWI Maturity Model.
These dimensions should now seem familiar because they are the same categories we have been
referencing throughout this guide. Of course, organizations can be at different stages of maturity in
each of these five categories, and most are.

Scoring
Questions may be weighted differently depending on their relative importance. Each dimension has
a potential high score of 20 points. Because organizations can be at different levels of maturity in the
five dimensions, we score each section separately as well as provide an overall score. The output of the
assessment is a score in each dimension and the total score.

Interpretation
Once you complete the survey, you will receive your results. The breakdown of scores for each
dimension is as follows:

SCORE PER DIMENSION STAGE

<=6 Nascent
7-10 Developing

11-14 Established

15-18 Managed

19-20 Optimized

For instance, if you receive a score of 11 in the Resources dimension of the assessment, you are in the
Established stage for that dimension. You should expect to see your scores vary across the different
dimensions. Data management programs don’t necessarily evolve at the same rate across all the
dimensions. For example, your company might have put together solid data architecture practices
and now it is ready to ramp up governance.
When you complete the assessment, you might see scores like this:

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 Summary

DIMENSION SCORE STAGE

Organization 10 Developing

Resources 15 Managed

Architecture 11 Established

Data Life Cycle 4 Nascent

Governance 13 Established

Total Score: 53
This means you are more mature in your resources and governance but less mature in the other areas.
Understanding your relative strengths and weaknesses will help you establish goals and, in turn,
target your efforts and allocate resources.

Summary
The TDWI Data Management Maturity Assessment provides a quick way for organizations to assess
their maturity in data management. The assessment is based on the TDWI Data Management
Maturity Model, which consists of five maturity stages.
The assessment serves as an initial measure of your data management maturity. It consists of about
75 questions across five categories; this merely scratches the surface of all the complexities involved in
building out your data management competency. To gauge precisely where you are, it may also make
sense to work with an independent source to validate your progress.

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 TDWI Research provides research and advice for data
professionals worldwide. TDWI Research focuses exclusively
on data management and analytics issues and teams up with
industry thought leaders and practitioners to deliver both
broad and deep understanding of the business and technical
challenges surrounding the deployment and use of data
management and analytics solutions. TDWI Research offers
in-depth research reports, commentary, inquiry services, and
topical conferences as well as strategic planning services to
user and vendor organizations.

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Woodland Hills, CA 91367

E [email protected] tdwi.org