The role of privacy maturity
How vulnerable your organisation is to privacy risk, and how well placed you are to achieve legal compliance and support business strategies or goals, depends on the effectiveness of your privacy management framework.
But a framework is only effective if it rests on solid foundations. A privacy maturity assessment is a stress-test of those foundations.
Strong foundations
Australian Privacy Principle 1, known as the Accountability principle, requires entities to establish and maintain an effective privacy management program. The OAIC calls this the ‘bedrock’ privacy principle.
Strong privacy management programs are essential to:
- establish the foundations needed to enable compliance with privacy laws
- improve business productivity by delivering certainty and confidence for employees around the appropriate way to handle personal information
- reduce the number and cost of data breaches, and
- anticipate and adapt to different business and regulatory changes.
Helios Salinger can assess the strength of your privacy program.
Our approach to maturity assessments
We use a Maturity Assessment Model, consisting of 21 attributes and 4 maturity levels. The matters considered include:
- how staff are trained in their privacy obligations
- what your privacy risk management methodology looks like, and
- whether you have key documentation in place, like a Privacy Policy and Data Breach Response Plan.
By utilising a standardised assessment tool, our privacy maturity assessments:
- gauge the ability of an organisation’s privacy management framework to achieve legal compliance, and support business strategies or goals
- benchmark where an organisation is at, compared to regulatory expectations or industry practice, and to highlight those areas for improvement; and
- set a baseline measure, such that progress can be demonstrated over time, via repeat assessments.
Different options
For those looking for a DIY approach, we offer a Privacy Maturity Self-Assessment Tool, to help you gauge the ability of your privacy management framework to achieve legal compliance, and benchmark where your organisation is at, compared to regulatory expectations. The Privacy Maturity Self-Assessment Tool is included in a number of our Compliance Kits.
We also offer a ‘DIY + Expert Check’ option: a fixed-fee service in which we supply you with the Privacy Maturity Self-Assessment Tool, then we later conduct a desktop review of your draft report, and a walk-through discussion and recommendations.
Or one of our senior consultants can conduct an independent maturity assessment for you, including analysis of your practices against our national maturity benchmarking data, to see how you compare to your industry peers.
Please get in touch to discuss how we can assist your organisation to uplift its privacy maturity.
National maturity benchmarking data
In 2025, we conducted Australia’s first survey on privacy maturity, to see how organisations are addressing privacy risk. Read our report Privacy Pulse 2025: Measuring Maturity, and see how you compare to your industry peers.
