It is a property of a product, not of a department
“The organisation is at level 2” is not actionable. “Credit Exposures Reporting scores 72, and here is the finding holding it back” is. The unit of measure is the data product, every time.
The argument has never been about importance. It is that the thing everyone agrees is important has never been measurable.
Data maturity is how far a data product can be depended on and proved — how well it is defined, owned and contracted, how reliably it runs, whether the governed steps actually happen, and whether there is standing evidence for all of it. Measured on the product, not on the programme.
“The organisation is at level 2” is not actionable. “Credit Exposures Reporting scores 72, and here is the finding holding it back” is. The unit of measure is the data product, every time.
Maturity is not what a team believes about itself. It is what can be shown: a named owner, a current contract, a quality result with a date, an approval that actually happened.
The high-level shape of the calculation. Every step is deterministic — the same evidence produces the same number.
The platform reads what it already holds — documentation, ownership, contracts, gate decisions, approvals — plus the job runs, quality results and asset events your own tools report in by API.
Evidence is evaluated against a canonical set of governance capabilities, anchored to established frameworks rather than invented for the occasion.
Each capability gets a level from the evidence behind it. Where there is no observable evidence, it is reported unassessed — not level one, and not a failure.
Capability levels aggregate into product state, operations, audit and workflows — the four dimensions that carry the 0–100 score.
The roll-up is deliberately not a plain mean. A single weak dimension pulls the score down rather than being offset by a strong one, because that is how the risk actually behaves.
Because nothing was asked of anyone, running it again costs nothing. The second run is what turns a number into a trend — and a trend is what a board can govern.
Six figures for a snapshot. Accurate the week it is written, stale by the time it is circulated, and impossible to repeat cheaply.
Measures opinion, not evidence. Everyone rates themselves a three, and nobody can show why.
DMBOK, DCAM and CMMI are sound. Scored manually they rate the programme, not the products — and “level 2” is not something anyone can act on.
New assessor, new answer. No evidence trail, no comparability, no trend.
We also sell an expert assessment. Here is how it answers this critique
Computed, not asked.
Not per programme.
A trend, not a PDF.
Unassessed is not zero.
Nobody fills in a questionnaire. The score reads what is already there.
0–100 per data product · illustrative
Documentation, ownership, contracts — is the product defined, owned and described well enough to be relied on?
Health, freshness, cost — is it actually running as promised, and at what price?
Evidence standing and current — is the proof still valid today, not just on the day it was filed?
Gates passed, on time — did the governed steps actually happen, in order, when they were due?
Bronze to Gold are earned automatically from evidence the platform already holds. Platinum requires an independent audit.
Documented and owned.
Monitored and contracted.
Evidence standing, gates enforced.
Independently audited.
Where there is no evidence, we report unassessed — never a failing score.
They mark anything unmeasured as a failure. That inflates the problem, and it destroys trust the first time somebody checks a specific line and finds nothing behind it.
No observable evidence means unassessed, with no level attached. It is a third state, not a bad one — and the database itself refuses to store a level without evidence.
Scoring absence as weakness manufactures findings the client cannot act on. A gap you name honestly is a gap somebody can close.
A 30-day pilot, one slice of your estate, success criteria agreed up front — and you keep the result either way.