BI Maturity Roadmap

Wonder where you are? Are you stuck? Here's a quick breakdown of each phase in the BI maturity roadmap...

Source System Reporting

If your reporting capabilities are limited and defined by third party vendor systems, ERP/M, CRM, etc... you are likely stuck here. You are likely frustrated by the lack of flexibility in your reporting and the lack of integrate enterprise data.

Your users are likely frustrated as well. Consumers are probably going to multiple UIs to download data into Excel and spend hours bringing that all data together. This is also where businesses see significant risks to data quality.

Operational Reporting

If you have some level of enterprise data integration and the ability to consistently deliver reporting to other doers in the business you are here. You are starting to offer them "one stop shopping" (a single UI) and they love it.

You, and your users, understand the metrics and KPIs that are important to your business but have yet to see them used in a meaningful way that "brings it all together."

When you attempt to write reports that aggregate large amounts of data you may have performance issues that make the reports unusable. You may have different data tiers in the business that provide different answers to very important questions.

In this phase you have to fight to stay relevant. If you can't make the move into analytics, someone else will!

Analytics

Analytics requires complete integration of enterprise data that is relevant to your metrics/KPIs. You should have a well-architected data tier in this phase that provides excellent performance on dashboard/report retrieval.

Your audience has evolved beyond doers and now you service stakeholders, executives, and their directs. You have marketing geniuses knocking on your door during lunch asking you "what ifs." There is a high level of trust in your BI solution providing "one version of the truth" to all business units.

You are starting to see the limitations of traditional BI reporting tools and looking into OLAP/MOLAP and cube analytics engines. You are also starting to realize that moving forward requires resourcing dedicated solely to analytics.

Life is good but could be better.

Advanced Analytics

Data science, data mining, predictive analytics, and "Big Data" live here. Yes, you can apply the concepts and principles of "Big Data" to data of any scale.

In this phase, your data is used in ways you never thought possible. Your existing KPIs are challenged and new ones are created.

We often have a hard time explaining to clients the value that can be discovered in this phase because we don't know until we get here.