The EDM Council has entered into a formal strategic relationship with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University to create a detailed and auditable methodology for modeling data management maturity. The SEI and EDM Council agreed to collaborate on the development of this new Data Management Maturity (DMM) model to help financial institutions become more proficient in their management of data and to provide a consistent and comparable benchmark for regulatory authorities in their efforts to mitigate operational risk.

The DMM initiative has been structured to document the components of data management at the specific business process level. It will incorporate the foundational process areas found in the Department of Defense (DoD) Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and CERT Resiliency Management Model (RMM) developed by SEI to define an assessment methodology that can be adopted by financial institutions worldwide. The model itself will be based on documented best practices and can be used as an operational route map for evaluating the efficiency of data management practices and as a benchmark for evaluating the status of operational integration.

The Council (in conjunction with our members) has drafted a core document proposing the characteristics of the levels of data maturity and an outline of the primary business components involved in data management. Basic framework documents, examples of DMM output and a statement of project rationale are posted on the web.