Capstone — From Baseline to Continuous Improvement
Situation
A multinational organization is preparing for a merger. Business units use different Data Management practices. Leadership demands one enterprise maturity score in three weeks. Interviews reveal conflicting self-ratings; some repositories are stale; one region refuses access; executives have already announced a Level 5 target. No framework has been selected and scope is undefined.
Seven-Part Resolution
1. Primary problem
DMMA planning/readiness, not maturity scoring. The organization does not yet have the conditions for a defensible enterprise rating.
2. Leading Knowledge Area
Data Management Maturity Assessment.
3. Supporting Knowledge Areas
Data Governance is central. Other KAs contribute evidence and will become capability targets as scope is defined. Organizational Change is particularly important because merger conditions, access resistance, and blanket target-setting affect the assessment and later adoption.
4. Roles
Executive sponsor, assessment lead, Data Governance or initiating steering body, business-unit leaders/participants, domain practitioners, repository/evidence owners, and improvement owners.
5. Best sequence
- Clarify the merger-driven business objective.
- Select a neutral, repeatable, appropriately comprehensive framework.
- Define a manageable enterprise or phased scope and explicitly identify exclusions.
- Choose interaction/evidence methods and a communication plan.
- Mitigate stale evidence, inaccessible region, inconsistent vocabulary, and buy-in risks.
- Gather formal ratings and proof of practice.
- Reconcile conflicting perceptions against framework criteria/evidence to a consensus current state.
- Interpret results in business/risk terms.
- Set target states based on required capability — not blanket Level 5.
- Build a sequenced improvement roadmap with timeline, expected maturity movement, oversight, and measures.
- Assign governance oversight and executive sponsorship.
- Schedule reassessment with comparable parameters to measure rate of change.
6. Tempting weaker responses
Rush to average one enterprise score. This creates false precision from inconsistent scope, weak evidence, and unreconciled opinions.
Fix practices during assessment. This mixes diagnosis and remediation and changes the state being measured.
Accept Level 5 everywhere. This ignores ordered progression, business-specific target state, prerequisites, cost, and change impact.
7. Changed fact
If the organization already has an approved framework, defined scope, evidence plan, executive sponsor, and credible accessible evidence, the best next action moves from planning/readiness to gathering information and performing the assessment.
Blank-Page Version
Rebuild this capstone using only:
DRIVER → PLAN → EVIDENCE → CONSENSUS → INTERPRET → TARGET → ROADMAP → GOVERN → REASSESS
Under each arrow, add the specific merger fact that makes that step necessary.
Source: synthesis of pp. 503–520.