Our Data Maturity Framework has been embraced by UK Government

UK Government's Central Digital and Data Office has published a data maturity framework for central government. It is based on our long-established Data Maturity Framework.

Our Data Maturity Framework was developed following extensive research with nonprofit organisations and is published under a Creative Commons licence to allow this sort of ‘remixing’. The UK government framework has also been published under the same Creative Commons licence.

Both frameworks provide a description of different levels of data maturity to help organisations understand where they are. The central government framework is based on six themes and five stages, whereas our Framework is based on seven themes and five stages (they dropped Analysis as a theme).

Using frameworks

Frameworks are interesting, but the real value lies in understanding where your organisation is with respect to a framework. The CDDO has laid out how it expects departments to approach this – those who want to measure themselves against the framework need to gather evidence, score each row (there are up to 97) and then calculate what stage of data maturity they are at using a spreadsheet.

Our experience has been that a data maturity framework isn't the most accessible tool for carrying out data maturity assessments. That's why we built our Data Maturity Assessment tool which has been used by hundreds of organisations, including many in the public sector.

Future developments

It's great to see central government embracing the importance of measuring and improving data maturity and it's great to see our Data Maturity Framework being used in this way. We hope the CDDO plans to iterate and develop their framework over time. Our Framework and Assessment Tool are always evolving. After all, what we think constitutes 'great' today will probably be very 'old hat' in 5 years time. We're on our third iteration of our own Framework since 2017 and are currently on version 23 of our Assessment Tool.

Measure your own data maturity

We're running a panel discussion on Assessing Data Maturity in the Public Sector on 19th April. It's free to join and will provide valuable insights from three different public bodies that have firsthand experience of measuring their data maturity.

For more information on data maturity check out our Data Maturity Hub.

If you’re interested in undertaking a Data Maturity Assessment in any sector please check out our Organisational Assessment offer.