What is a Data Lifecycle Assessment?

Understanding the importance and value of data is crucial for success in today's data-driven world. Organizations who haven’t prioritized data maturity often struggle with confidence in decision making and miss out on opportunities that leave them falling behind the competition. Over the years, we've helped more than 7500 customers globally across industries such as banking, insurance, financial services, automotive and education to implement and execute strategies that leverage and manage their data as an asset while creating a vision for the future. 

Throughout this experience, we’ve seen many similarities across industries which led us to develop a proven and predictable process to achieve data maturity that utilizes best practices, methods and techniques: Data Lifecycle Optimization (DLO). This leading framework creates remarkable value by assessing, planning, optimizing and maturing your data lifecycle in measurable and repeatable ways.

The very first step in realizing data maturity is assessing your current situation, which is exactly what we do during a Data Lifecycle Assessment. The Data Lifecycle Assessment is the first step in any optimization process, and it allows us to take a deeper look at your current situation. From there, goals are prioritized and a road map for your data optimization journey is created.

The Data Lifecycle Assessment

The assessment is based upon the 6 stages of DLO that are milestones of data maturity. Each stage comes with its own challenges, and our experts ask pointed questions to determine current maturity level and areas of risk for each stage. 

The following are examples of questions asked in each of the DLO stages:

Architecture and Configuration

• Do you experience issues with hardware reliability?
• Do you have a security strategy and is it regularly audited?

Availability and Continuity

• How often do you regularly test your important business systems?
• Do you have a disaster recovery plan?
• Do you leverage the cloud for availability or testing?

Performance and Optimization

• How do you measure performance of your applications? 
• When you have performance issues, how does your team react?

Business Intelligence

• How is your data validated?
• What is your master data solution?

Big Data Architecture and Deployment

• Are you aware of all the data sources that your business is using? 
• Are you prepared to integrate new data sources to your master data platform?

Business and Predictive Analytics

• How does your business perform forecasting?
• How do you evaluate yourself against competitors? 

Once the assessment is complete, we provide strategic recommendations based on our findings to develop an action plan using the DLO framework for achieving data maturity. Comprised of our world-class consulting, training and software services tailored to fit each client’s specific needs, our solutions enable teams to accomplish goals and empower business leaders to make better decisions.