I am a great fan of Maturity Models.

I find them an excellent way of articulating to a business user where their organisation is at in terms of technology, governance or business processes and what we need to do to improve them.

There are a quite a few Maturity Models out there now, from Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Campaign Management, ……

There are also quite a few organisations that produce and publish maturity models, analysts such as Gartner, specialty software companies such as Dataflux and even behemoths such as Oracle and IBM.

I found this great presentation (Data Governance Part II: Maturity Models – A Path to Progress) over at http://www.nascio.org/.

It puts a number of Data Management maturity models into one pack, so you can peruse and choose your favourite (or create your own of course)