Ryan Wakefield | 06/16/2016 | Data and Analytics
Analytics is of critical importance for an organization’s roadmap. Good analytics helps create the metrics which shape the roadmap of an organization and drive actionable results. Analytics also gives insights into history, competitive differentiation, and predictions about the future.
An organization’s analytics maturity can be described using an analytics maturity model. At AIM we employ a model with three levels of analytics maturity: Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive.
1. Descriptive Analytics, the simplest stage, groups data into useful bits of information in order to collect a summary or devise a conclusion. Descriptive Analytics are used to understand the past and present and ask cut-and-dry questions such as “what happened?” and “how many?”. It is a stage where users, processes and tools are more opportunistic or ad-hoc. Projects are focused on data visualization, reporting and self-service BI.
2. Predictive Analytics is a higher stage, which examines data to discover and predict future trends. At this stage, projects are focused on predictive modeling, statistics, data mining and advanced analysis. With predictive analytics you can ask questions like “what would happen if we change X?”
3. Prescriptive Analytics is the highest and most transformative stage, where an organization has the tools to learn from data how to prescribe the best course of action as well as predict possible future outcomes. One example is machine learning, which focuses on algorithms that can learn and grow when exposed to new data. With prescriptive analytics you can answer questions like “how can we learn from and address this automatically?”
From planning a multi-year analytics strategy and roadmap to creating an analytics center of excellence to launching a proof-of-concept in any of the types of analytics (i.e. descriptive, predictive, prescriptive), AIM Consulting has the expertise to meet organizations at their current level of maturity and help you get to the next stage.
Click here to download a high resolution version of AIM Consulting’s Analytics Maturity Model Infographic.
