Preface

The questionnaire is based on TDWI’s Big Data Maturity Model Guide 2013. We have tweaked it into a questionnaire to help big data project managers & CIOs to help identify their respective stage in the maturity model, and do some quantification of their current state of big data maturity (based on the scores assigned to each type of answer). The guide enlists five stages of Big Data maturity (nascent, pre-adoption, early adoption, corporate adoption, and mature/visionary) according to the respective organization’s state of preparedness. According to the guide, a typical organization can prepare herself for big data adoption on five levels; these are:

1. Organization
2. Infrastructure
3. Data management
4. Governance
5. Analytics

Project managers can self-discover the maturity stage of their organization by answering the following questions.

Organization

1. Does your company possess the knowledge about the importance of Big Data analytics?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

2. Has your company started exploring advanced Big Data analytics?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

3. Has the company hired an executive sponsorship for building a Proof of Concept (poC) as a part of business for Big data analytics?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

4. Is the company pursuing any Big data technologies (such as NoSQL or hadoop cluster?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

5. Is there one or more Proof of Concept (PoC) for big data adoption?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

6. Does an “analytics” culture prevail in the organization for big data?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

7. Is the funding process secure and ROI in place for big data analytics?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

8. Is data collaboration a big part of the company culture?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

Infrastructure

9. Does your company possess end-state data architecture for data management strategy?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

10. Is there a tier-2 production class structure installed and maintained in a company’s data center?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

11. Does the company has a big data specific hardware infrastructure in place?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

12. Is a coherent analytics infrastructure in place that can be used in mission-critical aspects of the business?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

Data Management

13. Does your company have an overall unified Data Strategy to manage Big Data?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

14. Is metadata attributed to department level and a defined end-state data structure?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

15. Is there a solid company wide big data management strategy in place to throw out data?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

16. Is the company able to perform multiple workloads on a cluster?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

17. Is the metadata attributed at division or company level?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

18. Is there a defined data lifecycle management and data audibility and lineage process or framework in place?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

Analytics

19. Is your company providing advanced predictive analytics in terms of unstructured data?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

20. Has the company employed experienced staff for big data integration?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

21. Does the company utilize large volume (greater than 10TB) of data stored in appliance?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

22. Does the company has dedicated in-house advocates in place for evangelizing big data?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

Governance

23. Is there a steering committee in place for overseeing the data governance and integration of data?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

24. Does the company follow top-down team strategies for Big data governance?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

25. Does the company follow bottom-up team strategies for Big data governance?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

26. Does the infrastructure and architecture of big data ecosystem comply with disaster recovery procedures?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

27. Does the big data infrastructure include proactive infrastructure monitoring?

• a) Yes
• b) No
• c) Not sure

Scoring your answers

There are 27 questions in this questionnaire divided into 5 dimensions. Each question contains options of ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘not sure’. The scoring of this assessment will be done according to the choices among these options.

Yes | +1

No | -1

Not Sure | 0

Identifying Big Data maturity stage

Nascent | 10 & below

Pre-adoption | 10-15

Early adoption | 15-20

Corporate adoption | 20-25

Mature/Visionary | 25& above

You should expect to see your scores for each dimension vary, as big data programs don’t necessarily evolve at the same rate across all of the dimensions. For example, your company might be more advanced in terms of bringing big data sources together than it is in analyzing them or governing this data.

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