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Corporate Technology
Maturity Model
Maintaining a competitive advantage used to be straightforward: build a better product, beat the competition on price, or create an irresistible buzz in the marketplace. Today, a competitive advantage is not so cut and dried. If a company wants to succeed long-term, it must leverage information to enter new markets, maximize customer value, make results-oriented decisions, and keep costs down. For many of today’s successful players, particularly the ones that sustain leadership atop their sectors, success is tied to the efficiency with which they operate and the quality and pace of their business decisions.1
The Corporate Technology Maturity Model below helps companies identify and quantify their data maturity, and assess the risks of undervalued data management practices. The Maturity Model also helps organizations understand the benefits and costs of moving to the next stage. As a first step, companies can review the 5 Stages of the Maturity Model below to determine what rung they currently occupy.2 From there, Enbase can assist in devising a strategy, business case and Return on Investment Analysis for companies that regard their information and knowledge management capabilities as strategic to their businesses.
Stage 1: Manual Systems and Processes (Unaware)
- No transactional / rules and logic-based systems in place – Excel used for almost everything
- Rudimentary reporting compiled by hand – again, primarily using Excel
- Business decisions made by gut feel based on weeks-old data
Stage 2: Transactional systems in place (Reactive)
- System in place to capture operational data, enforce simple business processes
- Canned reporting, some ad-hoc reporting
- Transactional systems are not integrated, difficult to report across systems
- No metrics have been defined as keys to analyze performance
- Business decisions guided by data coming out of transactional system, but usually based on snapshots of recent activity – no trending analysis, forecasting, anomaly analysis etc.
Stage 3: Manual Analytics (Proactive)
- Most business processes have been automated and corresponding data is captured in transactional systems
- Key performance metrics have been identified
- Data is pulled manually from various sources to populate the metrics
- Data is analyzed in Excel – trending, root cause analysis, etc.
- Business decisions guided by Key Performance Indicators, but due to difficulty in manually pulling data, time span of analysis is usually narrow, and not based on the most recent data
Stage 4: Automated Analytics (Proactive)
- Logic and rules-driven systems in place to capture raw data and assist and guide employees through workflows and responsibilities – all tied to overall targets and execution plans
- Infrastructure in place to automate extraction of data from various operational sources in order to perform analytics
- True data visualization via dashboards, charts, scorecards versus tabular reports
- Alerting capability notifies key personnel about significant changes in the KPIs
- Business decisions can be done almost in “real-time” based on data as recent as today. Can easily perform trending on wide time spans.
Stage 5: True Business Intelligence (Predictive)
- Applying algorithms to the data to try to predict future performance, identify patterns, create classifications.
- Business decisions are done “ahead of the curve” based on likely future performance.
Enbase can help your organization understand its current position, as well as plot its future position on the Corporate Technology Maturity ladder. We regularly work with and advise companies, often for little or no cost, as to their current technology, and what type of financial returns they can generate by enhancing their information technology capabilities. For more information, please contact us at (713) 492-0008 and ask to speak with a member of our Corporate Technology Maturity team.
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