TDWI research 2014–2015

TDWI BENCHMARK GUIDE

TDWI Analytics
Maturity Model
Guide
By Fern Halper and David Stodder

tdwi.org
Research Sponsors

Research Sponsors
Cloudera, Inc.

MicroStrategy

Tableau Software
TDWI research

TDWI BENCHMARK GUIDE 2014–2015

TDWI Analytics Table of Contents

Foreword from the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Maturity Model Reason for the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Guide Value of the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Interpreting Your Assessment Score Model Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

By Fern Halper and David Stodder Setting the Stage: Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Trends in Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

TDWI Analytics Maturity Model:

The Context for Benchmark Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Stages of Maturity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Stage 1: Nascent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Stage 2: Pre-Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Stage 3: Early Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
The Chasm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Stage 4: Corporate Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Stage 5: Mature/Visionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Evaluating Benchmark Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Scoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Research Sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Cloudera, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
MicroStrategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Tableau Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

© 2014 by TDWI (The Data Warehousing InstituteTM), a division of 1105 Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproductions
in whole or in part are prohibited except by written permission. E-mail requests or feedback to [email protected]. Product
and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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TDWI Analytics Maturity Model Guide

About the Authors

Fern Halper, Ph.D., is well known in the analytics community, having published hundreds of
articles, research reports, speeches, Webinars, and more on data mining and information technology
over the past 20 years. Halper is also co-author of several “Dummies” books on cloud computing,
hybrid cloud, and big data. She is the director of TDWI Research for advanced analytics, focusing
on predictive analytics, social media analysis, text analytics, cloud computing, and “big data”
analytics approaches. She has been a partner at industry analyst firm Hurwitz & Associates and a
lead analyst for Bell Labs. Her Ph.D. is from Texas A&M University. You can reach her at
[email protected], on Twitter @fhalper, and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/fbhalper.
David Stodder is director of TDWI Research for business intelligence. He focuses on providing
research-based insight and best practices for organizations implementing BI, analytics, performance
management, data discovery, data visualization, and related technologies and methods. He is the
author of TDWI Best Practices Reports on mobile BI and customer analytics in the age of social
media, as well as TDWI Checklist Reports on data discovery and information management. He
has chaired TDWI conferences on BI agility and big data analytics. Stodder has provided thought
leadership on BI, information management, and IT management for over two decades. He has served
as vice president and research director with Ventana Research, and he was the founding chief editor
of Intelligent Enterprise, where he served as editorial director for nine years. You can reach him at
[email protected].

About TDWI Research

TDWI Research provides research and advice for business intelligence, data warehousing, and
analytics professionals worldwide. TDWI Research focuses exclusively on BI, DW, and analytics
issues and teams up with industry thought leaders and practitioners to deliver both broad and deep
understanding of the business and technical challenges surrounding the deployment and use of
business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytics solutions. TDWI Research offers in-depth
research reports, commentary, inquiry services, and topical conferences as well as strategic planning
services to user and vendor organizations.

Sponsors
Cloudera, Inc., MicroStrategy, and Tableau Software sponsored the research for the TDWI Analytics
Maturity Model, online assessment tool, and this guide.

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 Foreword

Foreword from the Authors

Reason for the Model
Today, many organizations realize that analytics and advanced analytics can provide an important
competitive advantage. These organizations want to evolve their analytics strategies beyond
spreadsheets or simple dashboards; many seek to build a broad “analytics culture” in which data
analysis plays an essential role in all decisions and is fundamental to business collaboration. Analytics
is rapidly becoming more self-service and democratized. More frequently, agile development methods
are being used in analytics deployments so users can realize business value from projects sooner.
Over the past few years, TDWI has seen predictive analytics serve as a foothold for more advanced
analytics. Other advanced analytics technologies will also begin to gain momentum, including
geospatial analytics, text analytics, clickstream analysis, operational intelligence, and real-time
analytics. Big data, including machine data and the Internet of things (IoT), is driving activity in
advanced analytics, too. TDWI expects interest will continue to build for analytics technologies
and methods, particularly as organizations include less traditional users in their growing analytics
cultures.
We created the TDWI Analytics Maturity Model and assessment tool in response to organizations’
need to understand how their analytics deployments compare to those of their peers and to provide
best-in-class insight and support. The assessment measures the maturity of an analytics program
objectively across many dimensions that are key to deriving value from analytics.

Value of the Model

The Analytics Maturity Model can help guide IT and business professionals on their analytics
journey. It provides a framework for companies to understand where they are, where they’ve been,
and where they still need to go in their analytics deployments. The model can also provide guidance
for companies at the beginning of their analytics process by helping them understand best practices
used by companies that are more mature in their deployments.
A great feature of the Analytics Maturity Model is the interactive benchmark assessment. At the end
of the benchmark survey, you will be able to objectively quantify the maturity of your deployment,
understand your progress, and identify what it will take to get to the next level of maturity. This
benchmark guide is designed to help you understand the phases of maturity in analytics as well as
help you interpret your benchmarking scores. We trust you will find it useful.
Fern Halper, Director for Advanced Analytics, TDWI Research
David Stodder, Director for Business Intelligence, TDWI Research

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TDWI Analytics Maturity Model Guide

Introduction
A perfect storm of factors has come together to make analytics a mainstream technology. Research
indicates companies that utilize analytics are 5 percent more productive and 6 percent more
profitable than other companies.1 Organizations are realizing that analytics can provide valuable
insight to help them compete. Vendors are making analytics easier to use and consume. The
computing power exists for iterative analyses. The result is that analytics adoption is accelerating, and
not just among statisticians, data scientists, and others with degrees in math or statistics. Business
analysts and casual users are also making use of the technology.
Many companies are interested in expanding their analytics footprint but don’t know where to start.
Others are early in their analytics journey and want to understand what they should be doing next.
Still others may have been unsuccessful in their analytics efforts and need additional insights. Many
have had success and want to know what they should be doing to get to the next level. Insights and
best practices for moving forward would be valuable for these companies.

Model Dimensions
The Analytics Maturity Model assessment asks 35 questions across the five categories that form the
dimensions of the TDWI Analytics Maturity Model (see Figure 1).
• Organization: To what extent do the organizational strategy, culture, leadership, skills, and
funding support a successful analytics program? Additionally, is the company organized for
success in analytics? Are analytics widespread and used in everyday decisions?
• Infrastructure: How advanced and coherent is the architecture in support of an analytics
initiative? To what extent does the infrastructure support analytics for all parts of the company
and potential users? What technologies are in place to support an analytics initiative and how
are they integrated into the existing environment?
• Data management: How extensive are the variety, volume, and velocity of data used in analytics,
and how does the company manage its data in support of analytics? Data quality and processing
as well as data integration and access issues should be considered.
• Analytics: How advanced is the company in its use of analytics? This includes the kinds of
analytics utilized and how the analytics are delivered in the organization. It also includes the
analytics culture: that is, how analytics contributes to decisions made throughout the company.
• Governance: How coherent is the company’s data governance strategy in support of its analytics
program? Is the company able to manage users’ data discovery and analytical explorations
effectively without applying too many restrictions and getting in the way of their pursuit of
insight?

4  TDWI research 1 Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson [2012]. “Big Data: The Management Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October.
 Introduction

Analytics Maturity Assessment Criteria

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Figure 1. Scores are based on five primary dimensions of analytics maturity: organization, infrastructure, data
management, analytics, and governance.

Setting the Stage: Definitions

What exactly is analytics, and what is the difference between BI and analytics? What about analytics
and advanced analytics?
Analytics requires the ability to collect, manage, analyze, and act on ever-increasing amounts of
disparate data, at the right speed and within the right time frame. It includes methodologies for
development as well as technologies. When people think about analytics, they generally consider
a range of techniques, including spreadsheets, query and reporting, dashboards, performance
management, and more advanced techniques such as visualization and predictive modeling. At
TDWI, we often separate analytics into BI and advanced analytics:
• BI: Some people consider what is termed BI as historically oriented transactional, financial,
profit/loss, and cost-management activities. Because presentation is part of BI, data visualization,
user interfaces, and the user experience with data generally on workstations, laptops, and
mobile devices are part of BI. BI’s definition often extends to the server. A BI server could
include OLAP cube creation/management, ETL, and other data warehouse (DW) functions.
Some organizations might even call their DW a BI server (or vice versa). Self-directed, visual
data discovery technologies are changing the face of BI by enabling users to do more with
dashboards, reporting, data analysis, and visualization on their own with less IT direction.

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• Advanced analytics: Advanced analytics provides algorithms for complex analysis of structured
or unstructured data. It uses sophisticated statistical models, machine learning, and other
advanced techniques to find patterns in data for prediction and decision optimization. As
analytics becomes more advanced, it often becomes more algorithmic or formulaic.
For the purpose of the maturity model, we refer to the complete spectrum as analytics.
Of course, analytics is not just about techniques. It includes the infrastructure and data management
to support disparate kinds of data from a variety of internal and external sources. For example, is
the infrastructure adaptable? It also includes the cultural and organizational processes that enable
companies to become more data driven. This includes development techniques as well as the
processes in place to manage, govern, and utilize the data and analysis by a wide range of people in
the organization.

Trends in Analytics
A number of often interconnected trends in analytics are relevant for companies looking to become
more mature in their analytics efforts. These include:
1. Ease of use. In the past, analytics, especially more advanced analytics, often required command-
line code. Today, vendors have made user interfaces easier to use, or even drag and drop.
Visualizations are easier to construct. Preparing data has also become easier. Some vendors
provide new ways to bring data together, such as data blending, where the data is combined
without integrating it into a data warehouse or other system of record. This kind of analysis
is useful for discovery and analytics that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to traditional reporting
from an enterprise data store. Some vendors provide automation techniques for more advanced
analytics where the software actually suggests a model using the outcome variables and an
examination of the data.

Ease of use is important in analytics maturity because it can help organizations gain successes
early and then build on those successes to become more data driven. As enterprises mature,
often they are able to scale analytics for use by larger internal groups.
2. The democratization and consumerization of analytics. Connected to ease of use is the move to make
analytics available to more people in the organization. From the executive level to frontline
personnel, users increasingly depend on data and analytics for all kinds of decisions. Many
organizations would like to “democratize” BI and analytics—that is, enable a broad range of
non-IT users to do more on their own with data access and analysis.

Self-service BI and visual data discovery technologies are playing a major role in enabling users
to develop more sophisticated analytics and execute queries themselves, with IT’s blessing,
governance, and guidance in the background. Part of this trend also involves making analytics
more consumable (i.e., more accessible to different parts of the organization). This may involve
operationalizing or embedding analytics into a business process. See trend #5.
3. Business analysts using more advanced techniques. Also connected to ease of use is the move from
the statistician/modeler to a new user of predictive analytics—the business analyst. Business
analysts are becoming the new users of more sophisticated analytics techniques such as
predictive model building. These analysts might build relatively straightforward models. They
may collaborate with the statistician to build the model or validate it, or other controls may be
put in place before the model is productionalized. This often frees the data scientist/statistician
(typically a scarce resource) to build more complex and sophisticated models.

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 Introduction

4. Newer kinds of analytics. In addition to predictive models, other kinds of analytics are emerging
to help drive business value. These include text analytics, social media analytics, geospatial
analytics, and clickstream analysis.

Text analytics is the process of analyzing unstructured text, extracting relevant information, and
transforming it into structured information that can be leveraged in various ways. It is useful
in understanding the “why” behind what has happened. It can be used on both internal and
external data to extract important concepts, themes, or sentiments from the data. Text analytics
can also be leveraged for social media analytics.

Geospatial analytics involves the manipulation and analysis of geospatial data—often called
location or spatial data. This includes geocoded, remote sensing, and GPS data, and statistical
techniques as well as techniques designed for spatial and spatial/temporal data.

Clickstream analysis helps organizations understand the behavior of customers on their websites.

All of these techniques are starting to become more mainstream and can provide important
insight, either by themselves or in combination with other techniques. Typically, the more
mature an organization is in its analytics efforts, the more it makes use of newer forms of
analysis.
5. Operationalizing analytics. When you operationalize something, you make it part of a business
process. Operationalizing analytics is important because it helps make analytics more actionable
and hence drive more value. For example, a statistician might build a predictive model that
predicts churn. The model is then embedded in a system. As customers call a company, they
are scored by the model. Based on this score, information is then passed to a call center agent
as part of a business process—say, to up- or cross-sell the customer or take other measures to
retain them. The agent doesn’t need to know how the model works behind the scenes but can
make important use of the output for business advantage. Operationalizing analytics also helps
make it more consumable, and this is an important trend.
6. Big data. Big data—ever increasing amounts of disparate data at varying velocities—is the
buzzword du jour. However, it is much more than that. An important point about big data is
that it is helping to drive the use of already existing techniques as well as the development of
new techniques for data analysis.

Big data is also driving the use of newer infrastructure such as Hadoop and multi-platform
data warehouse environments that manage, process, and analyze new forms of big data, non-
structured data, and real-time data. This might include NoSQL databases, DW appliances, and
columnar databases. Other technologies such as in-memory analytics are also gaining steam.
Leveraging big data processing tools allows analysts to perform queries on larger data sets—
providing more robust models and deeper reports—and removes sampling errors that might
occur with smaller data sets.
7. New development methods. Unlike with BI reporting, analytics often demands that users explore
the data and try different visualizations and analytical techniques before they can arrive at
the reports or other conclusions they are seeking. Analytics thus often demands a different
methodology than has been used for most traditional IT projects to develop applications.
Instead of “waterfall” methods and cycles that do not deliver until the end of (usually) one long
cycle, many organizations are employing agile methods. These faster, incremental cycles have

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helped guide organizations toward greater business-IT collaboration, faster and more iterative
development cycles, and ultimately higher quality and satisfaction.
8. Open source. Open source is rapidly becoming more popular for infrastructure as well as
analytics. Hadoop is a prime example of how open source technologies are becoming important
in analytics. In fact, a whole ecosystem of tools and techniques has sprung up to make the
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) more user friendly. Commercial distributions of
Hadoop are becoming more powerful. On the analytics front, the emergence of the R language
is also evidence of the growing popularity of open source. Many analytics vendors are already
incorporating support for R into their packages. The open source Python programming
language is also increasingly popular for analytics. Open source is important because it enables
a community to innovate, and that is what is happening around the analytics ecosystem.
9. The cloud. Although it has taken longer than some expected for the cloud to be used in BI, it
is now starting to become mainstream. One reason organizations are trying to move toward
cloud is to offset costs with zero capital expenditure on infrastructure, maintenance, and even
personnel—often making BI more cost-effective. Additionally, time to deploy is shortened.
Organizations are making use of various types of cloud deployment and delivery options for
cloud BI and analytics. For example, if data is generated in the public cloud, it is often analyzed
there as well. This analysis might be basic or complex. More often, companies are capturing big
data in the cloud and then experimenting with it there. Based on the analysis, certain data is
brought on premises to the data warehouse.
10. Mobile BI and analytics. The increasing adoption of mobile devices has opened up new platforms
from which users can access data and both initiate and consume analytics. Executives on
the go can apply analytics to gain deeper insight into business performance metrics, while
frontline sales and service personnel can improve customer engagements by consuming data
visualizations that integrate relevant data about warranty claims, customer preferences, and
more. To address security, performance, and availability concerns, some organizations will
deploy cloud services to provide BI and analytics platform support for mobile users.
11. Analytics platforms. TDWI Research indicates that more companies are adopting analytics
platforms, which provide an integrated solution for analytics. This includes data management,
data preparation, and data analysis capabilities. The platforms can help drive efficiencies into
the analytics life cycle because they can help bring together the data as well as analyze it. The
platform can be delivered in different ways: in the cloud, on premises, as an appliance, or in an
integrated solution.

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 TDWI Analytics Maturity Model: The Context for Benchmark Scores

TDWI Analytics Maturity Model:

The Context for Benchmark Scores
Analytics maturity can be described as the evolution of an organization to integrate, manage, and
leverage all relevant internal and external data sources into key decision points. It means creating
an ecosystem that enables insight and action. In other words, analytics maturity is not simply about
having some technology in place; it involves technologies, data management, analytics, governance,
and organizational components. It can take years to create and instill an analytics culture in an
organization.
A maturity model for analytics is useful for any enterprise considering or in the process of
implementing an analytics project. First, it helps create structure around an analytics program and
determine where to start. It also helps identify and define the organization’s program goals and
creates a process to communicate that vision across the entire organization. A maturity model will
provide a methodology to measure and monitor the state of the program and the effort needed to
complete the current stage, as well as steps to move to the next stage of maturity. It serves as a kind of
odometer to measure and manage your progress and adoption within the company for an analytics
program.
The TDWI Analytics Maturity Model consists of five stages: nascent, pre-adoption, early adoption,
corporate adoption, and mature/visionary. As organizations move through these stages, they should
gain greater value from their investments. Figure 2 illustrates these stages.

Analytics Stages of Maturity

CHASM

1 NASCENT 2 PRE-ADOPTION 3 EARLY 4 CORPORATE 5 MATURE/

ADOPTION ADOPTION VISIONARY

Figure 2. Stages of maturity in the TDWI Analytics Maturity Model.

This benchmark guide provides an overview of each of these stages. This description provides a
context for interpreting your scores when you complete the assessment. The assessment measures the
maturity of an analytics program in an objective way across the dimensions we’ve mentioned that
are key to deriving value from data analysis. These dimensions are organization, data management,
infrastructure, analytics, and governance.

TAKE THE ASSESSMENT

Complete the assessment, determine your score, and use the information in this
guide for advice and best practices for getting to the next stage of maturity.

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TDWI Analytics Maturity Model Guide

Stages of Maturity

CHASM

1 NASCENT 2 PRE-ADOPTION 3 EARLY 4 CORPORATE 5 MATURE/

ADOPTION ADOPTION VISIONARY

Stage 1: Nascent
The nascent stage represents a pre-analytics environment. In this stage, most companies are not
utilizing analytics, except perhaps for a spreadsheet program. There is no real support for the
effort, although there are pockets of people throughout the enterprise who may be interested in the
potential value of analytics and who may be testing analytics software. Generally, in the nascent
stage, the culture is not analytic. In other words, the culture is not data driven and decisions are
made based on gut instinct rather than on fact.
Organization. In the nascent organization, most executives are unaware of the power of analytics to
help drive action. IT and the business typically do not work together to make analytics happen,
although either group may want to. Often, IT is not particularly interested in helping the business
get access to data unless it is under IT’s control because they believe they know best. Business may
have developed its own systems for activities that might be useful for analysis, but the analyst is
typically a spreadsheet super user. In this culture of non-collaboration, there may be pockets of
people trying to get educated about newer kinds of analytics because they know the old ways won’t
help them remain competitive.
Data management. Typically, the nascent organization has no sound data management strategy in place.
IT may believe that it has some sort of data management strategy—perhaps with some databases or
data sets that it uses for reporting—but hasn’t really thought about naming standards or metadata.
Data quality and consistency may be poor. Data volumes are typically low or in disconnected silos,
and data is generally structured only. On the business side, organizations are asking IT for data
or reports. If they have their own data sources for a business activity, these are typically siloed for
analysis, which is done by bringing spreadsheets together. It is a long undertaking to assemble a data
set for analysis.
Analytics. In the nascent organization, the spreadsheet typically rules. Most of the analysis is slicing
and dicing. Dashboards may be developed in a spreadsheet and e-mailed to those who “need to
know.” If the company has an analytics group, it is generally within a department or line of business
and targeted at a specific function such as marketing. In other words, analytics is occurring in
pockets and silos in the organization and one group does not know what the other is doing. Best
practices are not shared and there is no effort at creating a broader analytics culture involving non-
traditional users of analytics. However, in many nascent organizations, employees are getting tired of
not having access to data to make decisions. They want analytic tools so they can answer important
business questions. They do not want to rely on IT because it takes too long to get at the data.

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 Stages of Maturity

CHASM

1 NASCENT 2 PRE-ADOPTION 3 EARLY 4 CORPORATE 5 MATURE/

ADOPTION ADOPTION VISIONARY

Stage 2: Pre-Adoption
As the company moves out of the nascent stage and into the pre-adoption stage, it is starting to do
its homework about analytics. Staff may be reading about the topic and perhaps attending Webinars
or conferences. One or more organizations may have invested in some analytics technology such as
single instances of a low-cost front-end BI or data discovery tool or a back-end database, data mart,
or data warehouse for managed reporting. People are starting to understand the power of analysis for
improving decisions and ultimately business outcomes. Some key characteristics of the pre-adoption
organization include:
Organization: In the pre-adoption stage, often an executive sponsor has stepped up to drive the
analytics discussion in the enterprise. The sponsor may be frustrated because decisions are being
made in the absence of data, or the executive comes from an organization that is more data driven.
Perhaps one group is starting to use commercially available tools to do some analysis, even if it is
freeware. Other organizations will see what can be done and might get a project started. An analytics
discussion is beginning.
Data management: Often, in the pre-adoption stage, business and/or IT leaders envision the potential
value of combining multiple sources of data for analysis. The company has realized it needs a data
infrastructure to support its efforts, even if those efforts don’t yet involve working with the business
to develop the infrastructure. It may be that too many errors have been made with the existing data
set, or someone is pointing out the errors in the data. Whatever the reason, the investment is starting
for a data mart or data warehouse. Company leadership is beginning to think holistically about data
(which is still typically structured only) from the disparate sources around the company. IT needs to
step up to the plate and understand data quality issues, because the company is now thinking about
putting together a shared data resource and taking steps to ensure that users have relevant, consistent,
and timely data for analysis.
Analytics. Analytics is still rudimentary, but pockets of advancement are starting to develop. Business
analysts are realizing the power of visualization, for example, and may have invested in a low-cost
visualization tool to try to gain an understanding of their data. Marketing or other departments are
starting to ask questions that need answers. They need to realize that IT and the business need to
come together to support analytics and avoid a “Wild West” scenario by beginning to govern what
kind of data users can and should see.

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TDWI Analytics Maturity Model Guide

CHASM

1 NASCENT 2 PRE-ADOPTION 3 EARLY 4 CORPORATE 5 MATURE/

ADOPTION ADOPTION VISIONARY

Stage 3: Early Adoption

During the early adoption phase, the company is putting analytics tools and methodologies in place.
It is thinking about data management and reporting or dashboards. Users often spend a long time
moving through the early adoption stage.
Organization. In this stage, the company gets started with analytics. IT and the business may be
working together as a team on selected projects. Often, this is because an executive or someone with
clout has realized that IT is not helping the business and vice versa. There may be a business crisis or
changes detected in customer preferences and behavior that are driving this. The team is working to
determine the right business problems to solve and how to drive analytics into the decision-making
process.
However, not everyone has bought into analytics. The company might utilize analytics as part of its
decision-making process in various departments, but the company itself isn’t necessarily analytics
driven. Analytics projects led by individuals or single departments in the company could be bearing
fruit, and there is interest in building prototypes to see how analytics could be advanced and
extended further across the enterprise. As the organization gets excited about the prospects for how
analytics could improve decisions and outcomes more broadly, more people start to come on board.
This often means that a team is established to plan and strategize for a wider analytics scope.
Infrastructure. In this stage there may be analytics technology in place, but typically not any sort
of dedicated analytics platform or appliance for analytics unless it is in a proof-of-concept (POC)
stage. The company may also be thinking about a unified architecture that can enable users to access
multiple data sources and different types of data, including unstructured content. The company may
be considering or even evaluating POCs for deploying analytics systems in the cloud or developing
Hadoop systems to increase flexibility and reduce costs for some of its analytics initiatives.
Data management. In this stage, the organization typically has a data warehouse or data mart(s) in
place—typically for structured data only. In some cases, it may be that the company is working
primarily off its spreadsheet flat files, and that is fine as long as there’s a way to assure data integrity.
From a data strategy perspective, there is often metadata attributed at the departmental level.
However, defined data life cycle management and data auditability and lineage are lacking/absent/
nonexistent. Governance, to ensure that sensitive data is protected and that users have relevant and
appropriate data for analysis, is only starting to be put in place; a solid, company-wide analytics
management strategy is typically not in place.

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 Stages of Maturity

Analytics. In this stage, there may be pockets of BI, data discovery, or analytics tools throughout
the organization. Typically, these are self-service tools that enable slicing and dicing of data and
data visualization. There may be some groups or individuals, especially at established enterprises
with some history of performing data analysis for such tasks as loan approvals or risk analysis, who
are adept at more advanced analytics such as predictive modeling, but they may be aligned at the
department or line-of-business level. There may also be some outside consulting organizations
involved that are helping set the analytics strategy or have personnel on site who are performing some
kind of advanced analytics. Having personnel with the appropriate skill sets can be an issue here.
Governance. At this stage of maturity, some organizations might have a steering committee overseeing
the program from a governance perspective, with representatives from departments providing
reports on progress and compliance. However, most do not. Instead, for data governance, a similar
effort may be in place but only providing departmental-focused data strategy and management. A
corporate data management steering committee, with IT often leading the effort, could oversee data
integration.

CHASM

1 NASCENT 2 PRE-ADOPTION 3 EARLY 4 CORPORATE 5 MATURE/

ADOPTION ADOPTION VISIONARY

The Chasm
As organizations try to move from early adoption to corporate adoption and extend the value of
analytics to more users and departments, enterprises must overcome a series of hurdles. This is often
why they spend a large amount of time in this phase. There is the obvious challenge of obtaining
the right skill set. There may also be political issues. For example, one organization may have
been driving the company’s analytics effort and brought other departments on board. However,
when it comes time to extend the platform or establish more stringent standards and governance,
departments begin to fight over who owns the data, or whose particular vision is implemented.
Often, analytics isn’t available in a way that encourages adoption.
To successfully cross the chasm, you’ll need to address the following four challenges.
Funding. Many early analytics projects are driven by a visionary executive champion. Of course, it is
critical to establish wins with these early projects to secure funding. This funding needs to be both
IT and business driven. Business involvement is needed because analytics projects must have business
value with tangible business outcomes. In fact, organizations report that prototypes in the early
phases of analytics that show real results can help achieve buy-in and show what is possible. Typically,
business and IT can then work as a team; until they do, corporate adoption will not occur.
Data management and data governance. To move forward to corporate adoption and data sharing, a solid
data management and governance plan must be in place. Data management must adjust to different
and often dynamic requirements, data availability rhythms, and performance needed to support
“democratized” analytics. These are often quite different from standard and heavily scheduled BI

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TDWI Analytics Maturity Model Guide

reporting. To get to corporate adoption, data will need to be shared across the organization. This
means that without being too heavy handed and stifling users’ analytics, IT or the governance
committee must put in place the right processes and checkpoints for users to have the rights to access
and work with certain data.
It also means that data quality controls and practices must be implemented, and this often goes
hand in hand with data governance. Typically, companies will need to build toward a more unified
information architecture or company-wide analytics platform, or at least a less siloed and more
coherent way to get at data and ensure its integrity for analytics. This means data management and
governance are critical.
Skill sets. A big barrier for analytics projects moving past the chasm is developing the skill set for new
technologies such as self-service BI, Hadoop, or NoSQL databases as well as more advanced analytics.
The skill issue comes up most often as a barrier to moving forward with analytics. If the enterprise
can afford it, it will hire staff. Many companies are using a combination of approaches, such as hiring
from outside and training from within. Some organizations are utilizing internal user groups to help
build skill sets.
Cultural and political issues. Often the cultural and political issues can stop analytics from becoming
more pervasive. For example, a company might hit a roadblock when trying to operationalize
analytics as part of a business process, which is a sign of maturity. However, operationalizing
analytics—especially embedding it so others can consume it downstream—takes time because
building trust takes time. It can even take time for self-service BI to permeate an organization if
there are cultural issues. If a company does not have a culture of thinking with data and making
decisions with data, it takes time to get used to a new way of doing things.
Some organizations have noted that as users employ mobile devices for more of their interaction
with data, there is an increase in interest and adoption of BI and analytics applications that will run
on these devices. A well-planned mobile strategy that includes thinking about how analytics are
presented and consumed can help broaden analytics adoption. Other organizations have found that
success comes faster to enterprises that reach out to less-traditional users of analytics who often know
the data best—such as salespeople or line-of-business executives who are interested in interacting
with data and analytics on their mobile devices. This can help increase adoption.
Governance. Moving to corporate adoption requires an analytics governance team. To get across the
chasm, organizations should have program governance in place, with guidance for the program
and a steering committee that oversees how the program will be implemented in each division. The
program should be executed as a budgeted and planned initiative from the division perspective and
be treated on par with other data integration programs.
To cross the chasm, companies need to ensure that the right governance, data architecture, data life
cycle management security strategies, and organizational structures are in place but in a way that
is balanced and unobtrusive so users are not thwarted or delayed unnecessarily in their pursuit of
analytics. To date, we have observed many organizations spend extra time as they near the chasm
and require additional staffing to cross it.

14  TDWI research
 Stages of Maturity

CHASM

1 NASCENT 2 PRE-ADOPTION 3 EARLY 4 CORPORATE 5 MATURE/

ADOPTION ADOPTION VISIONARY

Stage 4: Corporate Adoption

Corporate adoption is the major crossover phase in any organization’s analytics journey. During
corporate adoption, end users typically get involved and the analytics transforms how they do
business. For instance, users may change how decisions are made by operationalizing analytics in
the organization. They will be using disparate kinds of data, even big data that is semi-structured or
unstructured, for their analytics efforts.
Organizations that reach this stage of maturity might have repeatedly addressed certain gaps in
organization, infrastructure, data management, analytics, and governance.
Organization. At this stage, the company realizes that analytics is a competitive differentiator and has
successful projects or at least mature prototypes that prove it. Innovation in data and analysis is a
core value, and an analytics culture prevails. The business strategy is generally a blend of top-down
and bottom-up, with a data infrastructure that can support this. Business and IT view themselves as
a team and have experience working together successfully on analytics projects. A growing analytics
culture and mindset pervades the organization. These organizations often think out of the box about
expanding the reach of analytics, even holding competitions or other events.
Infrastructure. In this stage of maturity, a range of technologies might be used, including enterprise
NoSQL databases, Hadoop, and appliances or a data warehouse, mostly on premises but with
some in the cloud. The information architecture is unified in a way that underpins analytics. The
company is thinking in terms of an analytics ecosystem that encourages innovation and enables
users to explore new types of data on a variety of platforms. The infrastructure and architecture of
the analytics ecosystem comply with backup and recovery or disaster recovery procedures, which
are in place. A unified architecture that takes an ecosystem approach is also installed. This may
include standardized analytics tools across departments, but not a hodgepodge of multiple tools and
platforms.
Data management. The more mature a company is, the better it can manage and make use of its data
specifically for advanced analytics, not just BI reporting. In this stage of maturity, organizations can
make use of many forms of data and absorb new sources of data as they emerge. Data sharing is a
collaborative activity that is well managed through strong data governance policies. Locking up data
in individual user or departmental silos is considered a negative in this phase; the company is actively
seeking to consolidate silos or employ data federation and virtualization to unify views of data from
across all components of the data infrastructure.
The company is always looking for new data, both internally and externally, to enhance its analytics.
From a data strategy perspective, there is metadata attributed at the division or company level and
a defined, end-state data architecture, whether in a semantic layer, in the platform architecture, or

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in a database layer. There is defined data life cycle management and a data auditability and lineage
process or framework.
Analytics. Any company might collect a large amount of data but not make use of it. It’s a sign of
maturity when new data coming into the organization can be analyzed quickly and made part of
the logical infrastructure. In this stage, analytics supports the organization. Typically, a company
at this juncture also has a center of excellence (COE) that serves different parts of the organization.
The COE includes the data science team, which might even train other groups in using analytics in
different forms. At this point, analytics might be operationalized as part of a business process. In
other words, analytics might be automated or integrated with the business process, such as using
machine-generated data together with other data about customers to determine a next-best offer.
Different kinds of data are analyzed—including unstructured data and geospatial data. These
companies are typically using new capabilities and not just existing BI infrastructure.
Governance. A company at this stage of maturity understands that analytics, for all its benefits, can
be a liability, especially if data from external sources is part of the equation. A company at this stage
should be concerned with answering questions such as: Whose data was it? Whose data is it? Where
is it going? How long will it last?
At this stage of maturity, organizations will have program governance in place, with PMO guidance
for the program and a steering committee that oversees the program from a company-wide
perspective. For data governance, a similar effort will be in place with a well-defined data strategy
and management and steering committee overseeing the progress of data. The overall executive
sponsor is involved in monthly updates. The program is executed as a budgeted and planned
enterprise initiative and treated on par with other data integration programs. The governance
oversight will not be too heavy handed; it will balance policy and data privacy needs with the
requirements of users to have the appropriate data they need for analytics that is relevant, timely, and
consistent.

CHASM

1 NASCENT 2 PRE-ADOPTION 3 EARLY 4 CORPORATE 5 MATURE/

ADOPTION ADOPTION VISIONARY

Stage 5: Mature/Visionary
Only a few companies can currently be considered visionary in terms of analytics. At this stage,
organizations are executing analytics programs smoothly using a highly tuned infrastructure with
well-established program and data governance strategies. Well-governed but flexible data access is
available for users so they can explore data and develop visualizations in a self-service fashion and are
not completely dependent on IT. Many programs are executed as budgeted and planned initiatives

16  TDWI research
 Evaluating Benchmark Scores

from the company perspective. In the visionary stage, there is excitement and energy in analytics and
a healthy and agile analytics culture benefits non-traditional users at middle management and even
frontline positions.
Organization. The visionary company has several characteristics. First, executives have bought into
analytics and view it as critical. Analytics is seen as a competitive weapon and the mindset is creative.
Second, analytics is not simply used to drive strategy or insight; instead, the business is always
looking for opportunities to use analytics in new ways. These companies realize that analytics is
becoming more pervasive and they need to be thinking out of the box. The mature and visionary
companies are typically able to access analytics from multiple devices. Analytics are a way of daily
life with these organizations, whether it is consuming the analytics or developing it.
Infrastructure and data management. How you manage complexity is key to analytics maturity. The
visionary company has deployed a coherent analytics infrastructure that is fully operational and
can be used in the mission-critical aspects of the business. Part of the infrastructure includes the
ability to integrate new sources of data for analytics, whether they are internal or external to the
company. The infrastructure uses what has worked in the past, including a data warehouse, and
may leverage newer technology such as commercial Hadoop and enterprise NoSQL databases. The
cloud is also typically used by more mature organizations for many reasons and usually in a hybrid
fashion. Hybrid cloud deployments often utilize public and private clouds as well as other data center
deployments. Governance is well established and self-service options are deployed with oversight
from a well-managed data access strategy.
Analytics. The visionary company continually develops analytics. Typically, such as company makes
use of all kinds of data, including unstructured data and real-time data, for decision making and
incorporation into business processes. The visionary company can connect the dots between new
data and existing assets. The company has established COEs and teams are working to deliver new
and exciting forms of analytics. Some visionary organizations build a joint business and IT team that
innovates on the technologies, brings them back to the business, and takes them into production.

Evaluating Benchmark Scores

The benchmark survey has 35 questions across the five categories that form the dimensions of the
TDWI Analytics Maturity Model (see Figure 1, page 5).
These dimensions should now seem familiar from the many references throughout this guide. These
factors, and others, are used to explore relationships in the data to help determine best practices for
analytics.
Of course, organizations can be at different stages of maturity in each of these five categories, and
most are.

Scoring
The questions are either provided singly or grouped together in a matrix. Questions may be weighted
differently depending on their relative importance. Each dimension has a potential high score of 20
points. Because organizations can be at different levels of maturity in the five dimensions, we score
each section separately as well as provide an overall score. There are also questions that aren’t scored
but rather used for best-practices guidance.

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TDWI Analytics Maturity Model Guide

The output of the assessment is a score in each dimension and the total score, as well as a gap
recommendation that provides advice and best practices for getting to the next stage of maturity.

Interpretation
Once you complete the survey, a report-based interface will show how your responses compare to
those of your peers. The breakdown of scores for each dimension is as follows:

Score per Dimension Stage

4–7.1 Nascent
7.2–10.1 Pre-Adoption
10.2–13.3 Early Adoption
13.4–16.6 Corporate Adoption
16.7–20 Mature/Visionary
For instance, if you receive a score of 11 in the organization dimension of the assessment, you are in
the early adoption stage for that dimension. You should expect to see your scores for each dimension
vary. Analytics programs don’t necessarily evolve at the same rate across all the dimensions. For
example, your company might be more advanced in terms of bringing analytics sources together
than it is in analyzing them or governing this data.
The Chasm can be overlaid between the Early Adoption and Corporate Adoption stages.
When you complete the assessment, you might see scores like this:

Dimension Score Stage

Organization 10 Pre-Adoption
Infrastructure 7 Nascent
Data Management 11 Early Adoption
Analytics 4 Nascent
Governance 7 Nascent
Total Score: 7.8 (i.e., the average)

This means you are more mature in your data management but less mature in the other areas.

Summary
The TDWI Analytics Maturity Assessment provides a quick way for organizations to assess their
maturity in analytics and compare themselves in an objective way against others with analytics
initiatives. The assessment is based on the TDWI Analytics Maturity Model, which consists of five
maturity stages with a chasm between stages 3 and 4.
The assessment serves as a relatively coarse measure of your analytics maturity. It consists of 35
questions across five categories; this merely touches the surface of all of the complexities involved in
building your analytics ecosystem. To gauge precisely where you are, you may also choose to work
with an independent source to validate your progress.

18  TDWI research
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