Part 3: Analytics Factors To Evaluate Maturity

The Factors Impacting Your Current Analytics Maturity

The key to understanding your company’s current analytics maturity is to evaluate the maturity level of each impact factor. There are many factors that contribute to the quality of an organization’s analytics, but can be summed up into three main categories:

People + Organization
Processes + Governance
Tools + Technology

See the full list of impact factors:

The Evaluation Process

To establish your company’s analytics maturity current state, evaluate the maturity of each factor. Typically when we do an assessment, we make these evaluations by interviewing people throughout the organization and digging into the current systems and processes.

Wondering how we assign a maturity level for each impact? Let’s take the “Education” factor under People + Organization in the Impact Factors Guide as an example.

If there is no formal or informal practices for education, that would be an indicator of ad hoc maturity level. If the company prescribed sending a couple of key staff to training, that might put them at the reactive level. Implementing required training for certain job functions could qualify them as the defined level. A managed level would be developing a curriculum based on the objective of growing analytics awareness, opening it up to people who are interested and perhaps when it is required for their career path. If a company instituted formal mentoring programs and created career paths in analytics, then they would be at the optimizing level.

This process continues for all the factors.  After evaluating each factor’s level of maturity, we can make an informed judgement of the organization’s overall maturity level.

Want insight into your current state and a roadmap that will set you up to thrive with data?

When we do an assessment for a client, there are three main goals:

1. Understand where they want to go – which includes understanding their overall corporate goals and their future goals for their analytics.
2. Get a complete view of they company’s current state – which is based on the process described above.
3. Provide a roadmap that lays out exactly what a client needs to do to bridge the gap between where they are at and where they want to go – this may include our BI Program Matrix tool to ensure the roadmap is tied to the company’s corporate objectives so the projects produce real business value and a return on investment.

Many companies don’t have a plan to grow in analytics maturity. Since they are just trying to keep up, they never can get ahead. Laying the foundation for this analytically mature, data-driven culture to exist, sustain, scale and be successful can be difficult. However, it is vital to have a plan to ensure future success. We can help you get there.

Even if you’re not where you want to be, there are tangible things you can do now to move up the maturity model.

Continue reading in the series:

Missed the first part of the series?

Part 2: The Ultimate Goal is Analytic Maturity