Tuesday, November 14, 2023

The State of Analytics in 2023 – TDWI Analytics Maturity Model

TDWI’s James Kobielus recently published a TDWI Snapshot Series Report on the 2023 State of Analytics. The report, co-sponsored by Alteryx, Pythian and SAP, places analytics as “a core decision support tool in modern organizations.” Its benefits include:

…deeper insights, increased productivity, improved customer service, improved operational efficiencies that drive cost savings, and top-line growth that delivers larger profits. For innovative companies, analytics can drive new products and services. It can also provide an important competitive advantage.

The centrality of analytics to successful modern organizations cannot be overstated, and “[a]s organizations strive to analyze data more effectively, they require a scalable, flexible architecture for data management, access, governance, and security.”

APOS Live Data Gateway has been a key piece for many of our customers seeking to establish such a data architecture. It expands, simplifies and unifies data connectivity for SAP environments and other analytics landscapes to leverage the important benefits of live data connectivity.

TDWI Analytics Maturity Model

TDWI’s Analytics Maturity Model (AMM) describes the maturity of organizations along five dimensions:

Organizational commitment
Resource commitment
Data infrastructure
Analytics
Governance

Earlier this year, TDWI conducted an Analytics Maturity Model survey of 122 organizations to determine the current status of each within the maturity model on a scale from Nascent through Developing, Established and Managed to Optimized. They found that the average score of these organizations was 55%, placing them in the “early Established stage.”

Data Infrastructure, Analytics & Governance

In the Established stage, the organization has committed to an analytics strategy and the advancement of data literacy across the organization. The finding that so many companies have reached the “early Established” stage shows that, while great progress has been made in analytics, most organizations have a long way to go to reach an Optimized state of analytics. The road ahead for these companies is clearly delineated through data infrastructure, analytics and governance.

Data Infrastructure

Kobielus writes:

In [the Established] stage, the organization has some sort of data warehouse or data mart(s) in place—typically still for structured data only, although it is looking at other platforms for new kinds of data. The company may be deploying cloud data warehouses or data lakes to increase flexibility and reduce costs for some of its analytics initiatives. It is moving toward a hybrid or cloud architecture with more data (perhaps 1-2 TB) it needs to manage.

Many of our customers have established cloud-based data assets and are looking for live connectivity between those assets and their analytics platform. They are also looking to establish connectivity to other data assets, including core operational application data sources, which provide current operational data to their analytics for dashboarding.

APOS Live Data Gateway simplifies high-performance live connectivity to all of these data assets, large and small, providing a centralized means of managing enterprise data connectivity.

Analytics

Kobielus:

In [the Established] stage, organizations use reports, dashboards, and some kind of selfservice tools that enable data visualization. The organization is thinking about making the move to use predictive analytics more widely for use cases in IT, operations, or marketing. It may invest in tools with search-based interfaces to offer easy-to-use options to the organization. Some of these tools are cloud-native. Skills start to become an issue because there is substantial handholding involved in self-service and more data scientists are needed to perform more advanced analytics.

Self service liberates IT resources for other critical tasks in the implementation of an analytics strategy. APOS Live Data Gateway’s centralized approach to enterprise data connectivity also makes it a critical resource for analyst and business user self service. Its Data Preparation Layer allows such users to leverage existing data modelling and create views on data assets from which to create reports.

Governance

Kobielus:

In [the Established] stage, a data governance team has formed but there are no real guardrails for analytics governance. Some organizations might have a steering committee overseeing data governance, with departmental representatives providing progress reports and compliance updates. However, most do not, although this may be a top priority

While the organization is formalizing its approach to analytics governance, it is of critical importance to support governance provisions already in place. APOS Live Data Gateway supports governance already established at the data source level. Its live connectivity respects permissions established within the data source (e.g., row-level security).

APOS Live Data Gateway

The APOS Live Data Gateway solution expands, simplifies and unifies your data connectivity for SAP environments and other analytics landscapes to leverage the important benefits of live data connectivity. It lets you:

Use data from its existing location
Use current data
Keep data behind the corporate firewall
Leverage a unified semantic layer
Leverage existing security and governance
Leverage existing data modelling