Your Data Culture Maturity Journey Starts With Knowing Where You Stand Today

We’ve been champions of a data culture for years. But as more organizations put more effort into building and improving their data cultures, many seek an enlightened and methodical path forward.

We’re excited to launch our new Data Culture Maturity Assessment, which takes what we’ve learned across hundreds of customers (including more than 40% of the Fortune 100!), and lets you quickly appraise data culture maturity, and provides benchmarks to help you plot a path to greater maturity.

Explore our Data Culture Maturity Assessment to understand your organization's data culture depth and development areas.

If you’re unfamiliar with a data culture, here are a few resources to up your data culture intelligence quickly:

1. Learn what is a data culture and why it’s critical to becoming a data-driven organization. 

2. Read more about Alation’s Data Culture Maturity Model and how we developed it.

3. Learn how to quantify your data culture’s maturity across the four key tenets: data search & discovery, data literacy, data governance, and data leadership.

4. Download “The Alation Data Culture Maturity Model” whitepaper to explore how maturity drives business success.

Where do you stand today?

For any journey, planning a way forward is difficult if you don’t know where you stand today. Our Data Culture Maturity Assessment provides an easy, self-service tool for scoring your organization’s data maturity against key criteria. You’re then presented with an executive summary report that serves as a discovery tool and a mechanism to plan a path of success.   The result of the assessment details your organization’s current maturity, explains how to improve in areas you deem critical, and details the potential consequences of maintaining your status quo. 

The assessment focuses on three use cases most relevant to our customers and of increasing importance to so many organizations today. These use cases are:

• Self-service analytics

• Cloud data migration

• Active Data governance

Each use case requires a robust and mature data culture, but your organization will have apparent priorities. Self-service analytics enhances data democratization by looking beyond simple data access to focus on data understanding and effective analysis. Cloud data migration relies on metadata for easier migration prioritization, efficiency, and eventual search and discovery in the new cloud environment. Data governance puts a premium on the rules and frameworks for data usage and management, which enhances data understanding, access controls, and identifying critical and sensitive data. 

The first step in the Data Culture Maturity Assessment is prioritizing those use cases for your organization.

An honest assessment to determine a true path

With your use cases prioritized, the remainder of the assessment walks through the four key tenets of data search & discovery, data literacy, data leadership, and data governance. You then select the statements that best describe your organization’s maturity in each area, ranging from foundational, developing, intermediate, advanced, to optimized.

It is critical that you answer these questions honestly. This is the time to ask and answer the difficult questions, determine your priorities, and navel-gaze as you assess your true data maturity. A low score in any or all areas is okay. Honesty leads to a better plan while overestimating your organization’s capabilities or maturity can result in poor recommendations and wasted effort.

Before you set out on the assessment, it’s a good idea to think and brainstorm with other decision-makers on your current state of data culture maturity. Are controls and procedures in place? Have data silos been dismantled? Is data properly curated? Which data sets contain personally identifiable information (PII)? Who uses specific data today, and who might need access to it tomorrow? Do workers have the right skills or access to the right training to utilize data properly?

Yes, it’s a lot. But thoroughness is worth the time here so you can use the Data Culture Maturity Assessment to develop an accurate and effective path forward for improving data culture maturity.

Using the Data Culture Maturity Assessment’s results to start your journey

Our Data Culture Maturity Assessment is available for anyone interested in better understanding a data culture and learning more about improving data culture maturity. You can then use the resulting summary report to socialize the findings with other senior leaders, convey the opportunities available by improving data culture maturity, develop a plan for moving forward, and more. 

The PDF summary report provides an overview of the assessment results and can be shared with executives and decision-makers as a conversation starter. The Excel-based journey map, which you will work on with your account executive,  provides a more tangible, actionable plan based on your priorities and honest assessment.

Start your assessment today

No matter where your organization stands today, there is always room for improvement. This journey is continuous. Priorities will surely change, and new goals for data culture maturity will undoubtedly arise. 

Your top priority now, however, should be taking the Data Culture Maturity Assessment for your organization. Click here to learn more and get started.