Standards that don't remove bottlenecks are a tax
A standard that doesn’t remove a bottleneck isn’t governance — it’s a tax.
We wanted to know where our data teams actually lose time, so instead of running a maturity assessment we mined the backlog itself: 40,000 tasks, read for what the work was about and where it stalled. The answer was lopsided. Stalls concentrated in data preparation, the unglamorous cleaning and reshaping that happens before anyone can use the data, and not in the areas maturity checklists spend most of their pages on.
Then we held every standard against that map and asked one question: which bottleneck does this remove? Standards that pointed at real pain stayed and got investment. Standards that existed because a checklist says a serious organization has them, whose only visible output was a document and a review step, we killed.
A maturity model describes an ideal organization; the task tracker describes the one you run. When the two disagree, believe the tracker — it bills you daily.
The deliverable of a governance review is a kill-list, not a longer checklist.