Most maturity assessments take six weeks and a consulting firm. This one takes 30 minutes and a whiteboard.
Get your leadership team in one room. Score six dimensions, 1 to 5: governance, data quality, analytics, data engineering, data literacy, platform architecture. That’s it. No consultants, no 80-page report, no steering committee.
People rush through the scoring. Then someone challenges a number and the real meeting starts. Quality: 4. “Really? We had two pipeline failures last week that nobody caught.” Quality: 2.
That correction is the assessment working. The bottom 1-2 scores are your anchor gaps. They hold everything else back. Across clients, it’s almost always governance or metadata sitting at the bottom. Everyone’s investing upstream in tools while the plumbing leaks.
From the scores, draft a 12-month plan. Quarterly horizons. Named owners. 1-2 initiatives per gap. Pick one north-star metric: “time to trusted insight” or “pipeline incident frequency.”
I used to think you needed a formal maturity model to get here. You don’t. You need 30 minutes of honesty in a room with the right people.
When’s the last time your leadership team sat in one room and honestly assessed data maturity?