Business Intelligence Maturity Model
Source: Gartner (December 2008)

Gartner has published a research report, in which it put together a roadmap for organizations to find out where they are in their usage of Business Intelligence. It provides a path for progress by which the organizations can move up quickly and benefit from BI initiatives. Here is a brief summary.

Please visit http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=500007 for the complete report.

According to Gartner, there are 5 maturity levels:

1. Unaware
   
2. Tactical
   
3. Focussed
   
4. Strategic
   
5. Pervasive

Level 1: Unaware

• Total Lack of Awareness
  
• Spreadsheet and Information Anarchy
  
• One-off Report Requests

What to do:

• Identify the business drivers
  
• Get commitment and resources
  
• Understand the data sources, data quality, architecture and systems

Level 2: Tactical

• No Business Sponosor, IT executive in charge
  
• Limited Users - mainly managers and executives
  
• Data Inconsistency and stovepiped systems

What to do:

• Get funding for finance related BI initiatives from senior executives
  
• Define metrics to analyze specific departmental or functional performances
  
• Find out requirements for dashboards
  
• Make case for BI Competency center

Level 3: Focused

• Funding from business units on a project-by-project basis
  
• Specific set of users is realizing value
  
• Successful focus on a specific business need
  
• BI Competency Center in place

What to do:

• Increase BI initiative scope across multiple departments
  
• Find BI investment and commitment for non-financial data such as sales and product
  
• Look for integrating the data and consolidate disparate analytic applications
  
• Create an enterprisewide metrics framework
  
• Expand the user base

Level 4: Strategic

• Establish a balanced portfolio of standards
  
• Business objectives drive BI and performance manangement systems
  
• Deploy an Enterprise metrics framework
  
• Governance policies are defined and enforced

What to do:

• Look to extend the BI application to supplies, customers and business partners
  
• Determine how to use BI to support evolving business objectives and strategy
  
• BICC should look at integrating BI Analytics with the business processes

Level 5: Pervasive

• Use of BI is extended to suppliers and customers
  
• Analytics are inserted into and around the business processes
  
• Information is trusted across the company