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The good & bad of BI maturity models

/ mr ben

I wanted to discuss two things that get used a lot in Data & Analytics, although I’m sure they exist in many other areas.

  • Maturity models – aka capability models
  • Maturity assessments – aka capability assessments

Maturity models are just a static image; a diagram explaining the spectrum of what can be done within a particular discipline.

Maturity assessments are surveys that require you to answer a range of questions about your organisation, they then generate a document/report that tells you your areas of strengths and weaknesses with some suggestions on which areas you should focus on first.

Some examples

Above, an example Maturity Model.

With this particular example, my opinion is that the exponential curve is inverted. For most organisations, moving from “1.0 Frustrated” to “2.0 In Control” is where you will see the biggest jump in “competitive advantage”.

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Kimball vs Inmon

/ mr ben
“We acknowledge that organizations have successfully constructed DW/BI based on the approaches advocated by others… Rather than encouraging more consternation over our philosophical differences, the industry would be far better off devoting energy to ensure that our DW/BI deliverables are broadly accepted by the business to make better, more informed decisions.”

– Ralph Kimball

We see this a lot; teams spend all their time in dead-lock deciding on which approach, project-methodology and architecture to choose and then just go and over-engineer something that is of little use to the business anyway.

It is a better approach to keep things simple and deliver early ensuring the solution is consistent, accurate and maintainable.  There is no point in making sure your data-mart can scale to 1TB in size if no-one is going to use it.