2017

TDWI Self-Service
Analytics Maturity
Model Guide
Interpreting Your Assessment Score
By Fern Halper
Research Sponsors

Research Sponsors
TDWI RESEARCH

2017

TDWI Self-Service Table of Contents

Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Analytics Maturity About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Model Guide About TDWI Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Interpreting Your Assessment Score Foreword from the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
What Is Self-Service Analytics and Why Is It Important? . . . . . 4
Trends in Self-Service Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

By Fern Halper Value of a Self-Service Maturity Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Model Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Stages of Maturity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Stage One: Analytics Stagnation and Isolation . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Stage Two: Business Self-Service Emerges . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
The Inflection Point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Stage Three: Collaboration Expands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Stage Four: Maturity Builds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Stage Five: Culture of Insight and Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Evaluating Benchmark Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Scoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

© 2017 by TDWI, a division of 1105 Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
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This report is based on independent research and represents TDWI’s

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information. TDWI shall not be liable for any omissions or errors in the
information in this report.

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

About the Author

FERN HALPER is vice president and senior director of TDWI Research for advanced analytics. She is
well known in the analytics community, having been published hundreds of times on data mining
and information technology over the past 20 years. Halper is also coauthor of several Dummies
books on cloud computing and big data. She focuses on advanced analytics, including predictive
analytics, text and social media analysis, machine learning, AI, cognitive computing, and big data
analytics approaches. She has been a partner at industry analyst firm Hurwitz & Associates and a
lead data analyst for Bell Labs. Her Ph.D. is from Texas A&M University. You can reach her by email
([email protected]), on Twitter (twitter.com/fhalper), and on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/fbhalper).

About TDWI Research

TDWI Research provides research and advice for data professionals worldwide. TDWI Research
focuses exclusively on data management and analytics issues and teams up with industry thought
leaders and practitioners to deliver both broad and deep understanding of the business and technical
challenges surrounding the deployment and use of data management and analytics solutions. TDWI
Research offers in-depth research reports, commentary, inquiry services, and topical conferences as
well as strategic planning services to user and vendor organizations.

Sponsors
MicroStrategy sponsored the research for this TDWI Guide and its accompanying Interactive
Assessment Tool.

2  TDWI RESEARCH
 Foreword

Foreword from the Author

Organizations are excited about self-service analytics—to help reduce time to insight, react to
changing business conditions, better understand customers, improve operational efficiencies, and
more. Most people think of visual analytics—discovering insights using visualizations to explore
data from different perspectives—when they think of self-service analytics. However, self-service has
evolved to include other aspects of the analytics life cycle, such as preparing data and automating
the building of predictive models. Vendors are working on making their tools ever easier to use—
providing intuitive graphical interfaces and intelligence inside the software to help guide even
nontechnical users to insight more rapidly.
TDWI research indicates that although a majority of organizations have adopted visual analytics for
use by BI and other analytics professionals, the technology may not have spread widely within these
companies. In other words, the use of self-service by business users is not yet pervasive. However,
many seek democratization of analytics because of the advantages it can provide, particularly in
lessening time to value and helping those in an organization gain insight.
Of course, analytics maturity of any kind is more than adoption. Analytics maturity is about the
evolution of an organization to integrate, manage, and leverage all relevant internal and external
data sources into key decision points. Likewise, self-service analytics maturity is not just about
the technology. It also includes the cultural and organizational processes that enable companies to
become more data-driven. This includes having organizational structures as well as processes in place
for a wide range of users to manage, govern, and utilize the data and analysis.
TDWI is well known for its maturity models and assessment tools. In early 2014, we created a big
data maturity model to help organizations understand how their big data and big data analytics
deployments compared with those of their peers and how they could advance with analytics.
The next year we created an analytics maturity model. We followed that up with two readiness
assessments: one for Internet of Things readiness and the other for Hadoop readiness.
We are excited to offer a maturity model and this guide for self-service analytics because it is such an
important market trend. We trust you’ll find it useful.

Fern Halper,
VP and Senior Director for Advanced
Analytics, TDWI Research

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

What Is Self-Service Analytics and

Why Is It Important?
There is a revolution happening in analytics and that is the move towards self-service. TDWI
research indicates strong interest in self-service business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data
preparation solutions. For instance, as far back as 2013, close to 80 percent of respondents in a
TDWI survey said it is important to implement analytics solutions that do not require significant IT
involvement. Companies are still very interested in this today. Self-service analytics technologies are
an important trend for democratizing BI and analytics, which is about giving more users better tools
for interacting with and analyzing data. Companies want to evolve their analytics strategies beyond
spreadsheets or simple dashboards; many seek to build a broad “analytics culture” in which analysis
plays an important role in decisions and is fundamental to business collaboration.
Organizations in nearly every industry realize that they need to be more analytical to compete
effectively. Self-service analytics is an important part of this trend. Self-service analytics, in many
ways, is an outgrowth of the frustration that business analysts and users have felt in dealing with
traditional BI tools such as static dashboards and predefined reports. Many users are interested in
exploring data on their own to reach their own conclusions, without having to rely on IT or some
other group to do it for them. Self-service provides these business analysts and business users with
more flexibility and agility to do so. Rather than simply consuming data, business analysts and
users can access and prepare data, ask questions, find patterns in data, and more. With self-service,
business users do not rely on IT for data and analysis, but IT has the transparency to monitor,
maintain, and update the data infrastructure for the analysis. Self-service technologies are playing
an important role in enabling users to develop more sophisticated analytics and execute analysis
themselves, with IT’s blessing, help in governance, and guidance—in the background.

Trends in Self-Service Analytics

Self-service analytics Self-service has become an important trend across many aspects of the analytics life cycle. Vendors
has become an are helping to drive this trend by providing tools that are easy to use for various personas in the
important trend across organization—including the business analyst, the business user, and even statisticians who prefer
the analytics life cycle. a nice graphical user interface to coding or writing in a scripting language. Popular areas for self-
service include data preparation, data analysis, and advanced analysis such as predictive analysis.
• SELF-SERVICE DATA PREPARATION. Self-service data preparation covers a range of processes that
begin with ingestion of raw data and continue through dealing with data quality, integrating
disparate data, and transforming it to make it useful for analysis. Traditionally, users spend a
lot of time preparing data—combining spreadsheets and trying to clean them up, asking IT
for data, or trying to access defined data structures from BI tools. In a recent TDWI survey,
close to 75 percent of respondents spent more than 40 percent of their time on a BI project
preparing data. This hinders productivity and increases time to insight. Leading self-service
data preparation solutions provide easier-to-use, graphical interfaces for selecting data sources to
analyze, blending the data, and automating processes, such as data quality or data joins.
• SELF-SERVICE VISUAL ANALYTICS. Data visualization is about presenting data through graphical
representations such as dashboards, charts, scatterplots, geospatial maps, and animated effects.
Leading self-service visual discovery tools come with libraries of visualization types to fit
different requirements, enabling users to easily apply them, often through familiar drag-and-
drop interfaces. Digging into data and examining data relationships enables users to examine

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 What Is Self-Service Analytics and Why Is It Important?

data from different perspectives and answer their “why” questions. Data visualization is
important to this flexibility of analysis. It allows users to slice and dice and to visualize their
data in multiple ways in order to provide insights.
• AUTOMATED MODEL BUILDING. Because data scientists and statisticians are often in short supply
and business analysts often know the right questions to ask, many vendors are offering tools
that help business analysts and even business users construct predictive models. In some tools,
all the user needs to do is to supply the target or outcome variables of interest, along with the
attributes that they believe are predictive. The software picks the best model. Some tools even
generate derived attributes such as popular ratios to use as model input. A number of these tools
provide details about the statistics/math used; some do not. Although early in adoption, this is a
growing trend.
Also contributing to this self-service trend are solutions where advanced technologies, such as
machine learning, are embedded into the software. These tools perform tasks such as suggesting
visualizations, identifying data quality issues, and automating models. For instance, some newer Cloud computing
tools use machine learning and other techniques to automatically provide analyses such as what and big data are also
is trending, leading and lagging indicators, outliers, and so on. In other words, they can provide important in this
users with insights for questions they may not have thought to ask. space.
Persona-driven solutions are also becoming more common. Here, there may be multiple user
interfaces in an analytics platform or software package geared towards multiple user groups. These
include business users, business analysts, data scientists, and data engineers. The business user
might have an easy-to-use GUI to enable them to visualize and analyze information. Business
analysts might similarly make use of a visual interface but also have the option to write SQL
or use an automated model-building feature. Likewise, data scientists might use both a visual
interface and a programming language interface, perhaps in a notebook environment that enables
them to use open source tools and run a model in real time. The self-service solution addresses
multiple personas, but theoretically, all can make use of the same underlying data structures.
Other important trends in this space include cloud computing and big data. The cloud enables
organizations to spin up systems faster and respond to immediate business demand for data
and analytics. Organizations can subscribe to cloud-based self-service solutions with speed
and, depending on their data needs, achieve rapid time to value. Additionally, as organizations
confront an ever-increasing amount of data, they want to analyze it. This big data includes “new”
forms of data such as text data from social media or geospatial data such as location. Big data has
contributed to the need for more self-service solutions including big data visualization solutions
and text analytics solutions.
The upshot is that organizations are moving in the direction of self-service—from ingestion to
data preparation to analytics—with the ultimate goal of using analytics to help drive decision
making and action. Often, multiple users want the flexibility to be able to analyze this data
themselves, even as it becomes more sophisticated.

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

Value of a Self-Service Maturity Model

TDWI research indicates that visual analytics tools are in use in the majority of organizations.
However, as previously mentioned, mostly BI and analytics teams make use of these tools; they are
not widely employed by business users. Of course, not everyone in a company needs to perform
self-service analysis. Many organizations feel that these tools provide value to certain parts of their
business—and they do. To increase the role of data and analytics in decision making, organizations
need to bridge the gap between technical and nontechnical users.
The TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model can help guide business and IT professionals on
their self-service analytics journey. It provides a framework for companies to understand where they
are, where they’ve been, and where they still need to go in their self-service deployments. The model
can also provide guidance for companies at the beginning of the process by helping them understand
best practices used by companies that are more mature in their deployments.
A great feature of The model consists of five stages of maturity and an inflection point. These are illustrated in Figure 1
TDWI maturity models and described in more detail in the next section.
and assessments
is the interactive
benchmark feature. STAGE ONE STAGE TWO Inflection Point STAGE THREE STAGE FOUR STAGE FIVE

Business Culture of
Stagnation and Collaboration
Self-Service Maturity Builds Insight and
Isolation Expands
Emerges Action

Figure 1. The five stages of self-service maturity.

The TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model also includes an assessment. This online survey
consists of 43 questions across five categories (described in the next section) that form the dimensions
of the maturity model. A great feature of TDWI maturity models and assessments is the interactive
benchmark feature. At the end of the survey, you will be able to quantify the maturity of your
deployment in an objective way by comparing your scores against those in other industries as well
as your own. This will help you understand your progress and identify what it will take to get to the
next level of maturity. This guide is designed to help you understand the phases of maturity in self-
service analytics as well as help you interpret your benchmarking scores.

Model Dimensions
There are five primary dimensions in the TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model as well as a
number of subcategories that are used to quantify capabilities (see Figure 2).
• ORGANIZATION. To what extent does the organizational strategy, culture, leadership, and funding
support a successful self-service analytics program? Are analytics widespread and used in
everyday decisions?
• DATA MANAGEMENT. Self-service should provide data that is trustworthy while still providing
flexibility to the organization. How well does the company manage its data in support of self-

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 What Is Self-Service Analytics and Why Is It Important?

service analytics? How does the organization deal with data quality and processing issues as well
as data preparation, integration, and access?
• INFRASTRUCTURE. Data is a key component of any analytics initiative. How advanced and
coherent is the data architecture in support of a self-service analytics initiative? To what extent
does the infrastructure support flexible self-service analytics for all parts of the company and
potential users? Can it meet performance demands? Does it make use of newer technologies to
support requirements?
• ANALYTICS. What is the scope of self-service analytics and what are users outside of business
analysts, IT, and other quantitative staff able to do with it? This includes the kinds of analytics
utilized and how the analytics are delivered in the organization. It also includes training.
• GOVERNANCE. How coherent is the company’s data governance strategy in support of its self-
service analytics program? Is the company able to manage users’ data discovery and analytical
explorations effectively without applying too many restrictions and getting in the way of their
pursuit of insight? Are policies in place? Is someone in charge?

PRIMARY CRITERIA

Data
Organizational Infrastructure Analytics Governance
Managment
Maturity Maturity Maturity Maturity
Maturity

QUESTIONS THAT QUANTIFY CAPABILITIES

Leadership Data Access Team Scope Policies

Data
Strategy Technology Delivery Structures
Preparation

Data
Reach Architecture Training Compliance
Integration

Impact Data Quality Performance Skills Stewardship

Security and
Culture
privacy

Figure 2: TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model framework.

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

Stages of Maturity
Stage One: Analytics Stagnation and Isolation
Inflection Point
STAGE ONE STAGE TWO STAGE THREE STAGE FOUR STAGE FIVE

Business Culture of
Stagnation and Collaboration
Self-Service Maturity Builds Insight and
Isolation Expands
Emerges Action

In this stage, leadership does not stress analytics and lags behind in terms of building a data-
centric strategy. Users are primarily working with spreadsheets and reports. There is not a lot of
sophistication in terms of what users can do with these reports; they are set up for data consumption.
In Stage One, Here, IT can provide data dumps for users, who mostly move the data into spreadsheets unless they
spreadsheets typically have requisitioned tools on their own.
rule. The data is
structured and IT Some typical characteristics in this stage include:
controls it. Online • DATA MANAGEMENT. IT may believe that it has some sort of data management strategy—perhaps
dashboards are a data warehouse or data marts that they use for reporting—but this data is not easily accessible
static and there is no to the business. Typically, the data is structured only and feeds reports or dashboards. On the
collaboration or real business side, organizations are asking IT for data or reports. If the business has its own data
governance. sources for a business activity, they are typically siloed for analysis, which is done by bringing
spreadsheets together. It can be a long undertaking to assemble a data set for analysis.
• ANALYTICS. In the isolation stage, the spreadsheet typically rules. Most of the analysis is slicing
and dicing. Dashboards may be developed in a spreadsheet and emailed to those “who need
to know.” Online dashboards exist but are typically static and developed by IT or a business
analyst. However, in many organizations, employees are getting tired of not having access
to data to make decisions. They want analytics tools so they can answer important business
questions. They do not want to rely on IT because it takes too long to get at the data.
• GOVERNANCE. Although IT feels that it has control over the data, it is not meeting governance
needs because business is typically not involved in governance. Centralized governance and
stewardship of the data is loose, and there is no real effort to apply metadata, etc., to improve it.
This stage is not sustainable, as organizations will ultimately realize that they can’t run their
businesses without better analysis and without the business having access to data to perform more
flexible kinds of analysis. It is important to move out of this stage of maturity. Typically, a business
leader emerges, either to begin to work with IT (who may also be reaching out to the business) or to
start a shadow analytics effort (see Stage Two). It may also be possible that a group of business users
comes together to drive the effort from the bottom up. These users typically start to use freeware or
other inexpensive tools to show the value that self-service analytics can provide.

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 Stages of Maturity

Stage Two: Business Self-Service Emerges

Inflection Point
STAGE ONE STAGE TWO STAGE THREE STAGE FOUR STAGE FIVE

Business Culture of
Stagnation and Collaboration
Self-Service Maturity Builds Insight and
Isolation Expands
Emerges Action

In this stage, the business, often frustrated with IT, starts to purchase its own self-service tools—
typically on the desktop or in the cloud. This is “shadow IT” where projects are managed outside
of, and without the knowledge of, the IT department. If IT purchases a self-service tool (either
on-premises or in the cloud), then it often tries to control it. In either case, IT still controls much
of the corporate data from OLTP and business applications, so if users want access to that data,
they need to go through IT. Sometimes the business will start to collect its own data from data
dumps, CRM, and external data sources for analysis. In some instances, IT becomes involved if
the business department moves from a desktop to a server version or the business wants a more
substantial product.
• ORGANIZATION. A business executive may have funded some of the early self-service tools, which
would most likely be for visual analytics. She may be frustrated because decisions are being
made in the absence of data. Alternatively, the executive comes from an organization that is
more data-driven. There is not necessarily any analytics culture happening in the department,
but movement is beginning. However, if more than one group is using self-service, these are
typically siloed efforts with more than one self-service tool.
• INFRASTRUCTURE. At this stage, the company typically has some sort of data warehouse or group
of data marts to support its reporting and dashboard efforts, which are well defined. These are
typically housed in IT. IT may even want the business to use their tooling more and may have
invested in a BI platform. However, IT is not collaborating with the business on the kinds of In Stage Two, the
questions that need to be answered. Sometimes IT invests in a “build it and they will come” business starts to
strategy with a BI solution, but that typically does not work. However, it is becoming clear that purchase its own self-
there may be other data sources that need to be part of the infrastructure. Between business and service tools, mostly
IT “owned” data, there may be data silos. visual analytics. IT still
controls most of the
• ANALYTICS. The business is starting to use visual analytics—either an inexpensive tool (funded
data and there is still
as above), a free tool, a SaaS tool in the cloud, or on a trial license. To start, they might upload
no collaboration.
data from their spreadsheets or data dumps they received from IT. Minimal data blending
might occur. The analysis might be some sort of slicing and dicing of data, heat maps, or some
rudimentary geospatial analysis such as data on maps—typically performed by business analysts.
If the business brings in more technical people, analytics might move beyond this. Excitement
starts to build as the business sees the kinds of information it can get out of the self-service
tools, although these tools are being used only by some in the organization and are often not
open to all who might benefit.

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

• GOVERNANCE. At this stage, there may start to be concerns about data quality and consistency
among business users as well as IT, as they realize that the data isn’t being governed properly.
This is a situation created by shadow IT—too many analytics silos and potentially haphazard
use of data. This starts to create the same situation as too many spreadsheets. It will be
important for IT and the business to come together, identify some team members, and get the
governance process off the ground. This can involve setting some policies as well as appointing
a data steward.
Again, this stage is sustainable for only so long. As the organization starts to build up its self-service
analytics efforts and brings in more data, it will realize that it makes sense to bring in IT. It is
important that organizations at this stage of maturity start to build bridges between IT and the
business. In order to move a self-service analytics effort forward, collaboration will be essential. In
a good collaboration, IT provides the data infrastructure that supports data discovery activities.
IT may also support the self-service analytics tools as the analytics environment becomes more
sophisticated. IT and the business work closely together, helping business to learn the tools.

The Inflection Point

STAGE ONE STAGE TWO Inflection Point STAGE THREE STAGE FOUR STAGE FIVE

Business Culture of
Stagnation and Collaboration
Self-Service Maturity Builds Insight and
Isolation Expands
Emerges Action

It should be clear by now that a sign of self-service immaturity is if the business has no future plans
to involve IT or vice-versa.
At some point, business and IT realize that it makes more sense to work together than separately.
This typically happens when the business has had some success with their projects and wants to
expand to more users with more or better data and possibly into more departments. This might
occur when business needs more funding, as IT often controls data-related budgets. Alternatively,
the business may have grown its implementation but realizes that it needs IT to step in and fix or
manage it. In any case, as pointed out above, this is when collaboration starts.
Once organizations move past the inflection point they start to build maturity across numerous areas
that are needed for self-service analytics to grow. Beyond simply slicing and dicing data and creating
nice visualizations, organizations begin to use self-service analytics and advanced analytics to drive
decision making and action in a consistent and believable way.
A number of strategies and processes begin to change as the organization moves past the inflection
point and matures to a culture of insight.

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 Stages of Maturity

• ORGANIZATION. The organization starts to become more analytically driven and may organize to
execute in that way. For instance, it might build out a center of excellence (CoE) that includes
a cross-functional team to help disseminate knowledge and train others. Change management
is on the minds of many because although tools might be available, people will have to want to
use them and be able to use them well.
• DATA MANAGEMENT. Although data from spreadsheets or one or two data sources might be
enough to get self-service off the ground, typically organizations will begin to look beyond
these data sources. This will include other internal data as well as external data such as social
media, text data, or other third-party data. The organization begins to realize that these new
kinds of data and big data can help drive insights. Self-service users will want to include them
in their analyses. Eventually, these organizations might implement a platform outside of their
data warehouse, which might include a data lake for data exploration and analysis. Here IT and
business collaboration is important to determine what goes into the lake and how it is managed,
both separately and as part of a broader architecture.
• ANALYTICS. There is a move to bring analytics to more people in the organization. This includes
business users as well as business analysts. As an organization becomes more mature, a number
of things can happen. First, as the organization moves through the stages of maturity, business
analysts might start to use big data and more advanced self-service analytics, such as automated
predictive analytics. Some in departments such as marketing may use other analytics as well,
such as social media or text analytics tools. Tools might become more persona-driven. Second,
more technical users—such as statisticians and data scientists—who do not like a scripting
interface might also make use of the tools for data and big data exploration or more advanced
analytics. These people can also check to make sure any model built using automated model
building tools makes sense before it is put into production.
Training also starts to become more important as organizations become more mature. Although
those with a nose for data and analytics might be utilizing some tools with some rudimentary
data-blending capabilities, most users need guidance in both implementing the solutions
and working with data and analytics—especially when it comes to data preparation or more
advanced analysis. Some might be able to work the tool but not perform analysis well. Some
will not be able to work the tools. Some are not critical thinkers to begin with. As self-service
tools start to permeate the organization, companies will need to be prepared to train users. For
example, in a recent TDWI Best Practices Report on data preparation, less than 20 percent of
business users are blending, consolidating, or creating calculated fields themselves. Most leave
this to IT or work with IT collaboratively to do this.1
• DATA GOVERNANCE. Consistency of data, data quality, and data integration become more At the inflection point,
important as organizations move through the stages of maturity. Data sourcing and lineage are collaboration begins
important here, and companies begin to recognize the importance of standardization. As they and maturity starts to
become more mature, they start to take note of the number of different analytics tools in the build.
organization and come together to strategize on how to work together. This, in turn, can lead to
cost savings and tool consolidation.

1 For more information, see the 2016 TDWI Best Practices Report: Improving Data Preparation for Business Analytics, online at
tdwi.org/bpreports.

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

These changes in maturity happen in the more advanced stages, outlined below.

Stage Three: Collaboration Expands

STAGE ONE STAGE TWO Inflection Point STAGE THREE STAGE FOUR STAGE FIVE

Business Culture of
Stagnation and Collaboration
Self-Service Maturity Builds Insight and
Isolation Expands
Emerges Action

By this stage, the business is starting to work collaboratively with IT and an expansion strategy
begins to give users access to data. IT might deal with issues such as licenses, performance, data
access, and architecture for the data warehouse. They might create sandboxes to help users explore
the data to see what is valuable, and then work together to set up applications. They are working on
data-related issues. The goal here is to make self-service work better and be sustainable—not for IT
to control self-service.
• DATA MANAGEMENT. During this stage, IT may begin to standardize the data for use by
the business. This is not meant to be a control issue. Rather, the idea is for everyone to be
working with high-quality data with common metadata. Locking up data in individual user or
departmental silos is considered a negative in this phase, and the company is actively seeking to
consolidate silos or employ data federation and virtualization to unify views of data from across
all components of the data infrastructure—often as part of the data preparation process. IT
may use agile or agile-like methods as a major collaboration point.
In Stage Three,
• ANALYTICS. Training is important here. As already stated, easier use does not mean that training
an expansion
is not necessary. Often the most important training is not on using tool features and functions
strategy begins. IT
but building skills to work with data and apply it to business decisions. Additionally, more users
starts to deal with
want to prepare data and advance the kinds of analytics they do. This might include predictive
data architecture
analytics or analyzing disparate data types, such as social media data. Some organizations might
and software in
build a team that is part of the chief data or chief analytics officer’s organization. Others have a
collaboration with the
CoE that might provide expertise and training to those looking for it. Analytics delivery occurs
business. Training
on multiple devices, including mobile.
becomes important
for data preparation • GOVERNANCE. A company at this stage of maturity understands that analytics, for all its
and visual analytics. benefits, can be a liability waiting to happen, especially if data from external sources is part of
A CoE may be formed the equation. A company at this stage should be concerned with answering questions such as:
and collaborative data Whose data was it? Whose data is it? Where is it going? How long will it last? The organization
governance begins. starts to put a governance team together that includes business as well as IT.
Collaboration is really the first major phase in becoming mature with self-service analytics. Business
and IT will need to determine how to work together. Planning questions will address responsibilities
as well as rollout. IT will need to put the right architecture in place to enable standardization of data.
A unified data management platform will become especially important as the organization matures
further and begins to deal with big data.

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 Stages of Maturity

On the organizational front, a critical key to success involves thinking about change management.
This will include evangelizing the concepts and value associated with self-service analytics so that
business users understand that these tools are available to them and not just to business analysts.
Some companies publicize results through online newsletters or other sources in order to start to get
people excited about the possibilities. Others play up proofs of concept.
Of course, this will involve a solid training plan as well. For example, some companies set up
training sessions that lead towards certification, which may involve a CoE with a cross-functional
team. Other organizations provide tool doctors, lunch and learns, or office hours to help answer
technology questions around both data preparation and data visualization. Some organizations look
externally for training. There are many different ways to approach training, but the important thing
is to do it—it will be key to building maturity and seeing results.

Stage Four: Maturity Builds

Inflection Point
STAGE ONE STAGE TWO STAGE THREE STAGE FOUR STAGE FIVE

Business Culture of
Stagnation and Collaboration
Self-Service Maturity Builds Insight and
Isolation Expands
Emerges Action

In this phase, users are becoming more mature with self-service analytics. They are working
with more data sources and doing deeper analytics. Here, the organization is better at aligning
technologies with use cases. In other words, if they have nontechnical users who primarily need data
visualization for reports and data consumption, they set that up. If they have users in operations who
need alerts, quick views, and so on, they set that up with more real-time data. If they have users who
are conducting data discovery and who want to do more advanced analytics based on what they have
discovered, they set that up.
• ORGANIZATION. At this stage of maturity, IT is now making it easy for business. IT understands In Stage Four,
that business users know what metrics and KPIs they need and what data sources they need, organizations become
and IT tries to make them available so that business doesn’t need to go outside corporate- more mature, perform
sponsored tools. Here, there is a conscious effort to set up a culture where decisions are more deeper self-service
data-driven (or data-informed). That means that leadership emphasizes numerical results analytics, and become
and insights to drive decisions, which percolates through different parts of the organization. more data-driven.
The organization’s actions are data-driven, based on their analytics. Often, by this point, an Technology is often
organization has set up a CoE that helps to disseminate knowledge and keeps ahead of the persona-driven and
curve in terms of analytics sophistication. disparate data is
analyzed.
• INFRASTRUCTURE. In this stage of maturity, a range of technologies might be used, including
Hadoop and appliances or a data warehouse, both on premises and in the cloud. The
organization is prepared to handle a growing number of data sources and is prepared to
add more on short notice. The infrastructure is meant to scale to support high volumes and
diversity of data. The information architecture is unified in a way that underpins analytics. The
company is thinking in terms of multiplatform data architecture that encourages innovation

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

and enables users to explore new types of data on a variety of platforms for analysis, including a
data warehouse, a data lake, and the cloud.
• ANALYTICS. At this point, analytics should be operationalized as part of a business decision-
making process. In the earlier stages of maturity, this might include interactive dashboards.
Here, more business users have access and are using visual analytics on multiple devices. They
are collaborative in their analysis and results are shared and iterated on with others. Additionally,
different kinds of data are analyzed—including unstructured data and geospatial data—and
this data can be accessed by those who need it. Data science teams, including business analysts
using self-service advanced analytics, might be part of the CoE. Tools are often persona-driven,
with different interfaces for different users. For instance, a business user might require a wizard-
based interface, but a data scientist might want an interface that allows him or her to write
scripts or connect to open source libraries.
• GOVERNANCE. As the organization introduces more data sources, it will need new best practices
and more people to help it become a success. Governance is a people and process issue that will
be sorted out in this stage. Governance includes data governance as well as process governance.
For instance, at this point, organizations may be making use of more advanced analytics, such
as predictive analytics, often in a self-service fashion. Data scientists or other experts might act
as control points for models built by business analysts in the organization (using automated
modeling tools) before these models go into production.
Self-service analytics is an evolution and this stage of maturity is a good one. However, some
organizations are able to take this further, to build a culture of insight and action. This often requires
time and success with self-service analytics projects. It requires commitment from the organization
around technology and process in infrastructure, data management, and governance.

Stage Five: Culture of Insight and Action

Inflection Point
STAGE ONE STAGE TWO STAGE THREE STAGE FOUR STAGE FIVE

Business Culture of
Stagnation and Collaboration
Self-Service Maturity Builds Insight and
Isolation Expands
Emerges Action

Technology adoption prospers when organizations build a culture that supports analytics. In
Stage Five, the culture becomes more robust and visionary. The organization does not make major
decisions or strategy changes without using analytics. Those who need to use self-service tools are
using them.
• ORGANIZATION. Only a few companies truly have a culture of insight and action in terms of self-
service analytics. Here, there is a greater operationalization and democratization of self-service.
Executives have bought into the notion of self-service analytics and see it as critical. There is
a conscious effort to set up a culture where decisions are data-informed. At this stage, there is
a highly tuned infrastructure to support self-service with well-established program and data
governance strategies. Additionally, there is excitement and a healthy analytics culture that
enables nontraditional users in middle management and even frontline positions to benefit.

14  TDWI RESEARCH
 Stages of Maturity

• INFRASTRUCTURE AND DATA MANAGEMENT. Managing complexity is key to self-service maturity. In Stage Five, there
Companies at this stage have deployed a coherent analytics infrastructure that is fully is a culture of insight
operational. Part of the infrastructure includes the ability to integrate new sources of data for and action. The
analytics, whether they are internal or external to the company. The infrastructure uses what infrastructure supports
has worked in the past, including a data warehouse, and may leverage newer technology such multiple data types
as commercial Hadoop and enterprise NoSQL databases. The cloud is also typically used by and a healthy analytics
more mature organizations, usually in a hybrid fashion. Governance is well established and self- culture uses results to
service options are deployed with oversight from a well-managed data access strategy. drive decisions.
• ANALYTICS. At this stage, the time to insight has been reduced and analytics is a way of daily
life within these organizations, whether it is creating or consuming the analytics. These
organizations are using self-service analytics to visualize and discover patterns in data, including
big data. They are analyzing disparate kinds of data using a range of tools. A range of tools
can be used because a governance framework has been established that allows people to access
any data source with any analytics tool. Additionally, advanced analytics is performed using
persona-driven tools, and there is a good control process in place to put models created by
automated predictive analytics tools into production.

Evaluating Benchmark Scores

The benchmark survey has 43 questions across the five categories that form the dimensions of the
TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model (see Figure 2).
These dimensions should now seem familiar because they are the same categories we have been
referencing throughout this guide. These factors and others are used to explore relationships in the
data to help determine best practices for self-service analytics.
Of course, organizations can be at different stages of maturity in each of these five categories, and
most are.

Scoring
The questions are either provided singly or grouped together in a matrix. Questions may be weighted
differently depending on their relative importance. Each dimension has a potential high score of 20
points. Because organizations can be at different levels of maturity in the five dimensions, we score
each section separately as well as provide an overall score. There are also questions that are not scored
but rather used for best-practices guidance.
The output of the assessment is a score in each dimension and an average total score. We also provide
comparisons with companies of the same size and industry.

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

Interpretation
Once you complete the survey, a report-based interface will show how your responses compare to
those of your peers. The breakdown of scores for each dimension is as follows:

SCORE PER DIMENSION STAGE

4 or less 1: Stagnation and Isolation

5-10 2: Business Self-service Emerges

11–15 3: Collaboration Expands

16–19 4: Maturity Builds

20 5: Culture of Insight and Action

For instance, if you receive a score of 11 in the organization dimension of the assessment, you are
in the Collaboration Expands stage for that dimension. You should expect to see different scores for
each dimension. Self-service analytics programs don’t necessarily evolve at the same rate across all the
dimensions. For example, your company might be more advanced in terms of bringing data sources
together than it is in analyzing them or governing this data.
When you complete the assessment, you might see scores similar to this:

DIMENSION SCORE STAGE

Organization 10 Business Self-Service Emerges

Infrastructure 7 Business Self-Service Emerges

Data Management 11 Collaboration Expands

Analytics 4 Stagnation and Isolation

Governance 7 Business Self-Service Emerges

Total Score: 7.8 (i.e., the average)

This means that you are more mature in your data management but less mature in the other areas.

16  TDWI RESEARCH
 Evaluating Benchmark Scores

Summary
The TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Assessment provides a quick way for organizations to
assess their maturity in self-service analytics and compare themselves in an objective way against
others with self-service analytics initiatives. The assessment is based on the TDWI Self-Service
Analytics Maturity Model, which consists of five maturity stages with an inflection point between
stages two and three.
The assessment serves as a relatively coarse measure of your analytics maturity. It consists of 43
questions across five categories; this merely touches the surface of the complexities involved in
building out a complete self-service program. To gauge precisely where you are, you may also choose
to work with an independent source to validate your progress.

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TDWI Self-Service Analytics Maturity Model Guide

Research Sponsor

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18  TDWI RESEARCH
 TDWI Research provides research and advice for data
professionals worldwide. TDWI Research focuses exclusively
on data management and analytics issues and teams up with
industry thought leaders and practitioners to deliver both
broad and deep understanding of the business and technical
challenges surrounding the deployment and use of data
management and analytics solutions. TDWI Research offers
in-depth research reports, commentary, inquiry services, and
topical conferences as well as strategic planning services to
user and vendor organizations.

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