Putting Data Modelers to Work

When working on a Data Governance program, thereA maturity model generally ranks your data one a 1-5
are some things that are critical to your success.scale. A 1 usually means you have no control over it,
Metrics is one of these - you must be able to clearlyand a 5 generally means you have full control over it.
show where you were, where you are going, andNow, how do you want to track these maturity levels?
what you have accomplished. If you can't do this, goodWell, you could dump all your in scope field names into
luck getting executive buy-in!yet another spreadsheet and then track them in Excel...
A wonderful item I discovered while developing goodor, how about this... have your Data Modelers track it in
metrics for my program was to create a Maturitytheir data modeling tool!
Model. I've written about these before, and if you needWhat we did was we added a new attribute to fields
more information, visit my blog for a 5 day course oncalled maturity level. Then, in that field we just assign
creating a maturity model. In essense, a maturity modelthe number that the field currently resides at. You can
is a way to display trends in your data. Is it gettingthen do cool stuff like pull all level 1 data, or all level 5
cleaner? Is it messy? What is good, and what isn't?data, or anything less than level 3.
Think of it as a sort of rating system for your in-scopeThis is a very powerful tool that is overlooked,
data.leverage your data modelers!!!