Developing Data Maturity Prescriptive Indicators as Starting Points of Museums' Big Data Adoption within "Smart Museum" Index Elaboration

The thesis describes the selection of indicators for assessing Russian museums IT-infrastructure in terms of data availability and quality as a part of Smart Museum Index. Smart Museum Index is an initiative of CIO of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts supported by others museums specialists aiming to create a measure for museum’s IT systems maturity that will allow cultural institution to become a part of “Smart city” concepts and contribute to world knowledge base as well. The paper consists of five chapters. Starting from the observation of museums missions and role of technologies in their fulfilment in the first chapter, paper explains the advantages of data-driven approach to museum daily routine. Also the attention is given to advantages of data exchange that means opening up internal data to international communities and using external sources for their need by providing illustrative examples. In order to define a target level of data maturity the third chapter describes the global Big Data best practices that embraces cities, banks, stadiums experience. Combining existing museum data analytic cases with big data best practises the Big Data Maturity Indicators were developed. They allow museum to match its data performance with one of the data maturity levels and understand what must be improved in its data strategy. To approve indicators capacity, they were tested in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts where the second level of data maturity was defined. Finally, the thought about positive influence of indicators on Russian museums is introduced.