Before investing effort in building or improving a data inventory, take stock of your organisation's current data management maturity. This gives you a baseline to measure progress against and helps you prioritise where to start.

What to assess

Prepare a brief state of play covering:

• Whether a data inventory or asset register already exists and, if so, how current and complete it is.
• How data is currently discovered, shared and accessed across the organisation.
• Whether data stewardship roles exist and are actively filled.
• What systems are used to store and manage data.
• Staff data literacy and capability levels.
• Known legislative or regulatory obligations relating to data.
• Current data quality challenges and where they are felt most acutely.

Use a maturity model

A structured maturity assessment gives you an objective baseline and helps you communicate priorities to leadership. Two tools are particularly useful:

• The ONDC Data Inventory Baseline Assessment — focused specifically on data inventory readiness.
• The DMAT (in the Tools menu of Dataplace) — a broader assessment covering all data management domains, including governance, metadata, quality, architecture and analytics. Well suited to organisations wanting to benchmark against international standards.

Data Maturity Assessment Tool: DMAT defines 6 maturity levels: Culture, Skills, Data, Leadership, Uses, Tools. Most organisations starting their data inventory work sit at a level 1 or 2. Knowing your level helps set realistic expectations and identify highest value next steps.

Repeat this assessment each year. Compare your progress from each assessment. Showing measurable improvement in maturity over time is a powerful way to demonstrate the value of data governance investment to senior leaders.

Document and share findings

Summarise your assessment in a short report, share it with senior leadership to build your case for resourcing and to secure executive sponsorship for the work ahead.