The analytics industry has a maturity model. Organisations progress from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive analytics. It's tidy. It's wrong.
Most data-rich organisations aren't decision-strong. They have dashboards, data teams, and data warehouses. Decisions still happen the way they always did — with gut feel, hierarchy, and whoever spoke loudest in the meeting.
The real maturity question
The question isn't: how sophisticated is your analytics?
It's: how many decisions per week are materially improved by data?
If the answer is low, your analytics investment is storage, not strategy.
Three shifts that matter
From reporting to decision support. Reports describe the past. Decision support shapes the future. Design analytics around specific decisions, not general curiosity.
From dashboards to workflows. A dashboard requires someone to look at it. Embed data into the workflow where decisions happen — CRM, pricing tools, planning systems.
From data team to data culture. The best analytics function in the world can't change an organisation that doesn't want to be changed. Culture work is analytics work.
Starting points
Pick three decisions. Map what information would improve them. Build only what's needed. Measure whether decisions improved.
Repeat.
That's analytics maturity. Not a model on a slide.