The Enterprise Data Management Council has launched the Data Management Capability Assessment Model, which provides documentation of best practices associated with the management of data across an enterprise along with a detailed set of standard evaluation criteria used for measuring data management capability.

The focus of DCAM is on the measurement of data management capability and the definition of the specific requirements needed to ensure trust in data as a factor of input into business processes.

“We designed DCAM to be practical. We crafted it based on the collective experience of practitioners,” said Michael Atkin, managing director at EDM Council. “The metrics for DCAM adopted the principles of practicality. We were also seeking to demystify the concepts of data management for executive management and document best practice for senior practitioners.”

DCAM is organized into eight core categories (strategy, business case, organizational structure, governance, data architecture, technology architecture, data quality, and data control environment).

The financial industry faces significant operational hurdles in data management, not the least of which is aligning data across multiple internal repositories in order to meet regulatory risk aggregation requirements.

“The goal of data management is straightforward – to deliver to business users and regulators, data that they trust and have confidence in to be precisely what they expect it to be, i.e. aligned with the legal obligations that form the foundation of our industry, without the need for reconciliation or transformation,” said Atkin. “We must make sure that the data is uniquely and precisely identified, and aligned to precise contractual meaning.”

DCAM was created as a collaborative effort among practitioners within banks, investment managers and other participants across the financial industry.

“We were seeking to demystify the concepts of data management for executive management and document best practice for senior practitioners,” said Atkin. “To accomplish that, we adopted three core criteria for our scoring.”

The first is to evaluate the degree of engagement with the data management program (i.e. are the concepts understood by the relevant stakeholders with decision making authority and at the appropriate levels of organizational participation).

The second is the degree of formalization (i.e. are the process and capabilities documented with methodologies and policies that are standardized/repeatable and with the appropriate definition of roles, responsibilities and accountability).

The third is the degree of evidence to support the data management program (i.e. the documents, artifacts, work products, metrics, etc.) to demonstrate data management capability.

The EDM Council was approached by a number of large banks to provide criteria that they could use to report to their regulators (and executive management) on the processes they were going through to address the objectives of enterprise data management. That request led to an intensive research activity on the practice of data management … which led to the development and publication of the DCAM.

“In essence, this was a collaborative initiative of the financial institutions facilitated by the Council to collect, organize and standardize the criteria for measurement of data management,” said Atkin.

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