Whether your operational leaders recognize it or not, governed data is the path to understanding, trusting, and using the wealth of information at their fingertips. Business Glossaries, Data Lineage, and Metric Management lie at the foundation for data governance.

• Glossaries, or repositories of both definitions and metadata, provide context
• Metrics, which standardize specific definitions, demonstrate success
• Lineage, the map of the relationships between metrics and the databases, repositories, and outputs containing them, illustrates impact

These keys unlock the value of information.

At Prominence, we’ve been working with healthcare organizations (HCOs) for years to tackle data governance challenges stemming from all sorts of drivers, such as compliance, consistency, and efficiency. HCOs are starting to move further than just recognizing the potential value of governed data; they are embarking on the complexities of the execution.

As partners with leading metric management systems, we understand the hurdles faced when operationalizing metric management. And, as experts in not only the tool capabilities, but also the processes and skills needed by all participating and owning teams, we’re proud of our opportunities to holistically address HCO needs.

It’s appealing to reuse existing metrics for so many reasons – the hard work of establishing a definition has already been done, the hard work of maintaining a metric is already accounted for, and the shared metric can be interpreted consistently between departments.

It’s no wonder that everyone gets excited about the ideal state of metric management, where a robust and operationally-driven glossary is used in a seamless process by accountable metric owners, and the cross-system impacts are visually represented through accurate lineage.

But you can’t walk from New York to LA in a day, and you can’t scale up from a budding appreciation for the value of metric management to the pinnacle of data governance in one fell swoop. To help our clients better assess their current state and plan for the future, we developed a maturity model specific to metric management. We’ll summarize it here:

• Level 1: Metric Compilation
  • At the base, the foundation of scaling your metric management program requires initial awareness of deficiencies and opportunities at your organization. This level is fully driven by Analytics and/or IT.
• Level 2: Metric Definition Requirements
  • Awareness of opportunities progresses into repeatable definitions for the metric lifecycle. Involvement from operations is scattered at this level, and Analytics retains ownership.
• Level 3: Metric Reuse and Maintenance
  • While there is organizational support for the work effort and value of metric reuse, Analytics still drives progress. At this point, a metric management tool is (or will soon be) implemented, but adoption is limited.
• Level 4: Metric Definition Distribution
  • Tool utilization rates improve as data domains interact consistently with the Glossary to view and utilize standard terminology. Operational ownership and stewardship is embedded in many domains.
• Level 5: Metric Lineage
  • Operations fully drives curation and maintenance of all facets of the data governance system. Both metric management and database lineage are ubiquitous and transparent to the business.

Do you recognize your organization’s maturity? Are you ready to level up? Let’s talk.