What's Your Data Analytics Maturity Level?

Has anyone ever asked you that? The idea sounds simple, but turning it on yourself (or your business) and assessing your maturity can be a seriously complex task. But how do you even begin to assess it and understand where you go next? Luckily, there are some really great tools out there that can get you started. For starters, Gartner has a great data analytics maturity model that includes “business outcomes, people, skills, processes, data and technologies.” It is based on 5 Levels:

1.    Basic/Unaware

2.    Opportunistic

3.    Systematic/Standard

4.    Differentiating/Enterprise

5.    Transformational

If you are beginning to assess your own company’s maturity, you would seemingly be either toward the end of phase 1 or maybe even into phase 2. Additionally, it’s possible for a business to be partially in many of these phases. But let’s take a step back. How can you pinpoint where you fall on the chart? Well, Gartner has a chart for that, too. It outlines characteristics within each maturity level, and helps you “plot” so to speak, where you might fall now and what you can aspire to. For instance, if your company values fact based decision making and operates under agile development, you might be somewhere between level 4 and level 5. The great thing about this characteristics chart is that it’s not meant to be a finite diagnoses, but a guide that helps you formulate strategy. CIO.com featured a data maturity model implemented by Dell, stating “The penalty for poor decisions is enormous, so resourceful firms are combining new data streams and existing data sets in new ways, and they’re applying analytics to tease out hard-to-find correlations and connections for better, faster decisions.” Dells model was split into four stages:

1.    Data Aware

2.    Data Proficient

3.    Data Savvy

4.    Data Driven

Again, CIO highlights certain characteristics that your company may have or may aspire to in order to move up to the next phase.

The way I’ve personally seen the assessment done is by determining what milestones and achievements you’ve already made, what analytics activities/projects you are working on now that will enhance your maturity level, and outline attainable short term goals, as well as drawing a clear picture of your aspired state. One activity that might be a win with your marketing and analytics team members would be to draw a chart of characteristics (all mixed up between phases) and ask the team to circle which characteristics they think the business already has in one color, and circle characteristics that you think are close to attaining in another color. It would be interesting to see the results and cross compare while working on a data analytics maturity strategy.

What I want to know is, what companies are out there that have reached a state of euphoria, ahem I mean, full maturity, and can I hide in their pocket for 24 hours?