3 steps to advance your data maturity journey

Data is your organization’s renewable resource that provides you with valuable insights that enable informed decision-making. When it comes to advancing your data maturity, it’s all about making your organization more proficient in using data to inform, guide, and automate its decision-making process to reach business goals. 

Whether those goals are improving your organization’s resilience to reduce downtime, reducing security risks by finding threats quickly, or improving customer experiences by helping your customers find what they’re looking for, the more data mature you are, the better you’re able to use that renewable resource and actually garner value from it. 

Get a quick refresher on the 4-step data maturity framework here before we jump into how to become more data mature. 

If you’re just starting your data maturity journey

If you’re just starting out on your data maturity journey, that means you’re able to collect some customer, product, or operational data to create retrospective reports. With those reports, you can make some decisions based on your data. Think: noticing that there is a spike in login errors and conducting root cause analysis to quickly find the issue.  

You’re in a great position to take your strategy to the next level by capturing, cleansing, correlating, and enriching all of your available data in a central repository. Every error message, security event, text log line, and time stamp needs to be captured from all of your data sources, so terabytes of this type of data are available to collect and analyze. Sure, one single log could mean nothing, but it could be the indicator of the latest ransomware attack or that your system is about to reach max capacity. You need a line of sight into everything happening in your infrastructure, and you do that by capturing all of your data to analyze it and make data-backed decisions. 

If you’re in the midst of your data maturity journey

If you’re in the midst of your data maturity journey, that means you’re able to collect all of your data, analyze it, correlate it, and enhance it to make decisions. Now that you’re confident in having a holistic view of your data, it’s time to start using it to automate tasks.

By applying machine learning capabilities on top of actionable insights — for example, using an AI assistant to help bridge knowledge silos and accelerate problem resolution — you can automate key business processes to optimize operational performance. If your systems detect security issues, you should have automated ways to prevent or respond to them. You can ask the AI assistant for a step-by-step guide on how to respond. This helps free up analysts’ and engineers’ time to take on more complex projects.

How to advance when you’re advanced

If you’re advanced in your data maturity journey, you’re able to collect all of your data and automate routine tasks using that data. Your next step will be to create a collaborative, silo-busting culture at your organization. That happens through implementing a unified solution. 

By implementing a unified solution, you’re able to bring together data that may not reside in the same place, doubling its value. For example, when it comes to user behavior monitoring, you’re monitoring customers to understand their buying behavior. But this data is also useful for cybersecurity purposes. You can monitor the same data to look for anomalies and patterns. Are these humans interacting with your application? Or bots? Bringing together these solutions and all of your data allows you to unlock insights you may have otherwise missed.

And through a unified solution comes a unified user experience across all of your tools and data stores. With a single solution that does it all, IT teams don’t need to relearn a new tool each time a new solution is deployed. Your organization will also reduce data redundancy by storing all of your data in one place. Since observability data can be identical to security data, there’s no need to store that twice and waste resources. With a single data store, you decrease licensing and storage, hardware, and infrastructure costs.

The journey continues…

There is no finish line to cross over or trophy to win when it comes to your data maturity journey. It’s a never-ending quest that continues as data sources are added, technology advances, and new business needs arise. That means data holds the key to solving your business challenges, including boosting operational resilience, reducing security risks, and improving your customers’ experiences. Find out exactly how to solve those problems with data with our strategic guide to putting your data to work with AI.

Originally published February 27, 2023; updated June 24, 2024.

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