Analytics Maturity Model – Navigating your data journey
Welcome to the first of five articles on the Analytics Maturity Model.
Organisations will often say ‘I want to become more insight driven, but I don’t know where to start.’ Like any journey, it starts with the first step. Not necessarily where are you stepping to, but where you are stepping from. That will determine what the rest of the journey looks like.
What is the benefit of being insight driven? ‘It’s always been done that way’ is a popular justification for some of the business-critical decisions, but what is the danger of this? Organisations know their businesses inside out, but what if there was a way for them to have a clearer view of what is happening? Why is it happening? What might happen in the future? and how to control what will happen in the future? Sometimes there are blind spots, areas where efficiencies can be made that go unnoticed, but they might be having a massive impact on the bottom line. Having a 360° view has been proven to reap massive benefits for organisations.
Often organisations can face issues such as a lack of the correct infrastructure needed to capture and analyse data correctly. This is seemingly a costly exercise, however the cost of not investing in analytics can far exceed the cost of investment in infrastructure.
The Analytics Maturity Model maps out what the journey to becoming insight driven looks like. At Endeavour, we know that journey is unique to every business, but this is the broad model to helping organisations become empowered to make more complex business decisions.
The Analytics Maturity Model
The first step in any organisations analytical journey is working out ‘what happened?’. An example of this is ‘what were my sales this week?’ This provides the core foundation to understanding where the fires are, what needs immediate attention? This stage is around understanding your data, therefore it requires the most care when setting up your data capture methods, aligning on metrics and establishing their definition. This solid foundation of analytical best practice allows for adding the next layer of analysis and help organisations to understand ‘why did this happen?’ Are there any trends? What is the wider context? So, ‘why were my sales low this week?’ This can only be achieved with the right foundation in place. Ensuring that sales data is captured correctly and the definition of ‘sales’ is defined. The next layer to this is understanding ‘what will happen’, when organisations have a view of certain trends, i.e. what is the potential impact on sales during adverse weather? Having historical sales data alongside weather statistics allows a view of a correlation between the two metrics, this in turn can give a view of what might happen to sales in a storm, or in a heatwave and allow stock levels to be adjusted accordingly to avoid waste. That leads to the next layer of how much I need to adjust stock levels by to ensure waste is minimised depending on the weather conditions.
At Endeavour, we have helped numerous organisations at varying stages of their analytics Journey. We understand the value of the rich industry and business knowledge when it comes to laying the foundation of the pathway to become insight driven. We collaborate with organisations to embed that knowledge at the heart of business decisions alongside accurate and meaningful data.
Join me this time next week, when I’ll be taking you on the first step of the Analytics Maturity Model journey by diving into Descriptive Analytics and looking at how it can be applied to a real life example.