Assessing Stewardship Maturity: Use Case Results and Lessons Learned

Abstract:

Assessing the current stewardship maturity state of datasets is an important part of ensuring and improving the way datasets are documented, preserved, stewarded, and disseminated to users. It is a critical step towards meeting U.S. federal regulations, organizational requirements, and user needs, especially in the area of data quality.

Stewardship maturity assessment models provide a uniform framework for a consistent assessment within the context of data management in organizations and portfolios, and stewardship of individual datasets, respectively. A key component of dataset and stewardship models maturity is data quality and documentation of the quality. The Data Stewardship Maturity Matrix(DSMM) developed in partnership with NOAA’s National Centers of Environmental Information (NCEI) and the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites–North Carolina (CICS-NC) has been used to assess stewardship maturity of highly-utilized datasets within NCEI. Consistent application of the model across heterogenous data types (satellite, in situ, regional, global, etc.) and across multiple levels of stewardship support has proven beneficial but challenging.

This presentation will demonstrate the utility of the DSMM through results from use case studies and its application for documenting data quality, indicate the challenges of consistent implementation and provide recommendations on improved application.