The State of Insights Driven Business Maturity 2019

Licensed for individual use only
The State Of Insights-Driven Business Maturity,

2019
Benchmarks: The Insights-Driven Business Playbook
by James McCormick
January 31, 2019
Why Read This Report Key Takeaways

In previous reports in this playbook, we identified Fewer Than One In 10 Firms Are Advanced
insights-driven businesses, how they are With Insights
different, and why they succeed. The next step According to surveyed global data and
for CIOs is to understand the overall maturity of analytics decision makers, only 8% of firms
their insights practices. This report uses data gain sustain competitive advantage with mature
from the Forrester Analytics Global Business systems of insight.
Technographics® Data And Analytics Survey,
Insights-Driven Businesses Lead From The
2018, to provide CIOs with a benchmark of
Top With Systems Of Insight
insights maturity, identify reasons for business
Businesses that consistently compete using
success in advanced firms, describe strategic
insights have a mandate for a top-down
approaches, and analyze operational habits.
investment in — and alignment of — people,
technology, process, and data to service the
entire enterprise with systems of insight.
Firms Must Accelerate Their Insights Maturity,

Starting Today
Early adopters of mature insights practice stand
to gain the greatest advantage. This will continue
for years to come, but the competitive edge
gained from being insights driven will dwindle as
the market catches up.
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For CIOs
The State Of Insights-Driven Business Maturity, 2019

by James McCormick
with Srividya Sridharan, Gene Leganza, Melissa Burgess, and Jeremy Vale
January 31, 2019
Table Of Contents Related Research Documents

2 While The Insights Journey Is Hard, Getting Four Essential Steps To Transform To An Insights-
There Is Worth It Driven Business
Advanced Firms Turn To Systems Of Insight Gauge Your Insights-Driven Business Maturity
To Deliver Market Differentiation
Insights-Driven Businesses Set The Pace For
5 Advanced Insights-Driven Businesses Have Global Growth
Strong Leadership
6 The Opportunity Is Now To Differentiate On

Insights
Share reports with colleagues.
What It Means Enhance your membership with
9 Get Ready For The Insights Disruption Research Share.
10 Supplemental Material
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For CIOs January 31, 2019
While The Insights Journey Is Hard, Getting There Is Worth It

Insights-driven businesses are setting the pace for global growth. For the past three years, Forrester
has been tracking these businesses, which have shown incredible growth — we estimate their
combined annual revenues will reach $1.8 billion by 2021.1 The results of our Forrester Analytics Global
Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018, show an uneven distribution of firms
across three levels of insights maturity:
›› Beginners want to be insights driven — but lack a top-down strategy. The use of data and
analytics is common across all firms, but the ability to apply these investments to deliver real and
sustained competitive advantage eludes 57% of the surveyed global data and analytics decision
makers who have seniority level or above.2 While the leaders of many firms in the beginner stage
understand the need to be more strategic with insights, they are still trying to form — let alone
execute on — consolidated insights approaches.
›› Intermediate firms are starting to gain differentiation with insights. Just over a third of survey
respondents (35%) are in some way starting to gain competitive differentiation through their
insights practices.3 For example, GE Digital deploys an agile insights framework, FastWorks, that
measures, analyzes, and optimizes new ways of executing on products and services. The process
is designed to drive innovation and provides it and its customers differentiation within the functional
areas that it is applied to.4
›› Advanced firms are a small minority that apply insights for competitive advantage. Only
8% percent of survey respondents represent firms that can continuously apply insights to drive
decision making, actions, and customer experience at scale — to gain market differentiation (see
Figure 1).5 Firms such as Earnest deliver competition-beating experiences and loan products that
would not be possible without excelling at insights.
© 2019 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 2
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
FIGURE 1 Few Firms Have Advanced Insights-Driven Businesses
Distribution of insights-driven business maturity levels
8% Advanced
35% Intermediate
57% Beginner
Base: 2,573 global data and analytics decision makers who have seniority level of manager or above
Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Data And Analytics Survey, 2018
Advanced Firms Turn To Systems Of Insight To Deliver Market Differentiation
In the The Anatomy Of A System Of Insight report, Forrester described a system of insight as the
business discipline and technology to harness new, actionable knowledge that can be implemented in
software to consistently turn data into action (see Figure 2).6 Advanced insights-driven businesses:
›› Create sustainable competitive advantage with systems of insights. Systems of insight help
companies such as Zions Bank and Stitch Fix inject data and analytics across multiple parts of the
business, from marketing and procurement to security and product delivery. By doing so, advanced
firms like these create sustainable competitive advantage — advanced insights-driven firms are
240% more likely than beginners to create this advantage (see Figure 3).
›› Grow revenues faster than beginners. Systems of insight continually help firms make better
decisions, execute more effective actions, and deliver more enticing experiences. Advanced firms
know the importance of these systems to their top line and are 178% more likely to use systems of
insight to grow revenue than beginners. Even more powerful is that when advanced firms do grow
revenue, they are about 2.5 times more likely than beginners to grow revenue at rates of 20% or more.7
›› Readily adapt to digital disruption — and are not stunned by it. The digitization of business
practices, from marketing to commerce and now to products and services, has given firms to
the opportunity to collect information and act on it in innovative ways. Advanced firms know
this; they are about 2.3 times more likely than beginners to place systems of insight at the heart
of their business in order to adapt to customer changes with greater agility.8 This allows them to
continuously optimize their businesses to the ever-changing competitive and customer environment.
FIGURE 2 Systems Of Insight Bring Data, Analytics, And Optimization Together In A Closed-Loop Process
2. Identify outcomes and

interim metrics. 3. Gather (more) data.
Find metrics for every outcome. Start with the data you have,
Instrument and measure processes, but add new sources and
decisions, and outcomes. kinds of data as you learn.
1. Experiment and
learn continuously.
6. Measure results Question every process
and refine insights. and decision. Run
experiments to learn. 4. Develop insights.
Courageously assess and
share the results. What did Apply analytic and artificial
you expect to happen? intelligence methods to
develop potential insights.
5. Test and implement

= Process currently present in business insights in software. Accelerated
intelligence Run insights experiments by AI
in software, processes,
= Process new for systems of insight and decisions.
FIGURE 3 Firms With Advanced Insights Practices Outcompete Beginners
Advanced insights-driven-businesses, compared with beginners, are:
178% more likely to grow revenues

with their systems of insights
228% more likely to be good at

leveraging insights systems to adapt
agilely to customer changes
240% more likely to create sustainable

competitive advantage with their
insights systems
Base: 1,376 global data and analytics decision makers whose firm is adopting “systems of insight” (of
beginner and advanced maturity level)
Advanced Insights-Driven Businesses Have Strong Leadership

Truly insights-driven businesses have a mandate for top-down investment in — and alignment of —
people, technology, process, and data to service the entire enterprise with systems of insight.9 Firms
can’t delegate responsibilities to any one division, be it marketing, sales, operations, or finance. So
while bottom-up and functionally specific leadership and ROI justifications are still important, firms
need to lead from the top down to deliver cross-functional insights capabilities at scale. In advanced
insights-driven businesses:
›› Chief analytics officers (CAOs) lead analytics and optimization programs. Advanced insights-
driven businesses analyze data and generate insights in a closed loop to continuously learn and
optimize actions, decisions, and experiences. Analytics and algorithms are at the center of these
advanced insights-driven businesses. It is no surprise, then, that 84% of global data and analytics
decision makers employed at firms with advanced insights maturity either have already appointed,
are in the process of appointing, or plan to appoint a CAO by early 2019 in order to deliver and own
the systems of insight that support the entire enterprise.10
›› CEOs keep their finger on the analytics pulse. An omnipotent characteristic of firms that gain
sustained competitive advantage with insights is that the CEO has a keen knowledge and interest
in making sure the business succeeds with data, analytics, and optimization. CEOs are starting to
ensure that owners of systems-of-insights programs report directly to them in order to maintain
visibility and a level of control. The most common direct boss of the CAO is the CEO, with 38%
of global data and analytics decision makers in advanced firms citing this reporting structure. The
next most common reporting lines decrease rapidly in frequency, with 31% and 12% of CAOs
reporting to the CIO and COO, respectively.11
›› Leadership teams rely heavily on quantitative insights for decision making. Not only are CEOs
of advanced insights firms obsessed with insights — they want other leaders in their organization
to be obsessed as well. In a digitally transformed world where data on customers, marketplaces,
and partners abounds, leaders are relegating gut-feel decision making to history. In advanced firms,
94% of global data and analytics decision makers have at least an interest in their management
culture relying more on quantitative decision making; advanced insights firms are also 2.7 times
more likely than beginners to be expanding and upgrading reliance on insights in this regard.12
›› Chief data officers (CDOs) evolve beyond data management block and tackle. Whether in the
beginner, intermediate, or advanced stage, many firms have a CDO and will continue to do so.13
However, the days of focusing only on large data hygiene and management programs that promise
business value tomorrow are over. Within advanced insights firms, the CDO’s focus is shifting to
helping businesses extract valuable insights from raw data to support quick (or even real-time)
decisions, actions, and experiences from new digital data sources. CDOs’ advanced data strategies
also include new data sources such as those from customer and internet-of-thing (IoT) devices,
whose useful half-lives are much shorter than that of traditional information such as transactional data.
The Opportunity Is Now To Differentiate On Insights

Move now to get ahead of the curve. While the average level of maturity in the market is low, this will
change rapidly over the next two years as firms realize the strategic importance of insights. Firms are
already rapidly building out the necessary competencies and disciplines to compete with insights. Early
adopters stand to gain to greatest advantage. This will continue for years to come, but the competitive
edge gained from being insights driven will quickly dwindle when the rest of the market catches up. To
get ahead of this opportunity, CIOs must:
›› Look at what insights-driven business are competent at — and seek to emulate them.
Insights-driven businesses do well in five competencies areas (see Figure 4).14 However, about nine
in 10 firms are not advanced within each of these competencies.15 To support insights, look for
opportunities to enable people, create processes, build technology architectures, and democratize
data. Most importantly, you must develop defined strategies for elevating insights across the
enterprise at scale to deliver market differentiation.
›› Increase process discipline to boost competencies. Firms need discipline to attain the required
level of proficiency in any of the five insights competencies.16 They need four aspects of discipline
to master each competency: rigor, coordination, accountability, and scale (see Figure 5). Advanced
firms are much more adroit across all areas of discipline than other firms. However, opportunities
to increase insights discipline abound all firms. CIOs must document and follow repeatable
processes, collaborate on insights across teams, increase the accountability of processes, and
apply disciplines within all teams across their organization.
›› Measure insights maturity to assess opportunities. Without a methodical approach to analyzing

your firm’s insights maturity, finding and prioritizing opportunities can be hard. Start by gauging
the maturity of your business within each competency area using Forrester’s self-assessment. This
will help you discover the disciplines and competencies your firm must build or strengthen in order
to boost insights maturity. Assessment and prioritization is an essential step for enterprise-level
transformation to insights.17
FIGURE 4 Insights-Driven Businesses Are Highly Competent In Five Organizational Areas
STRATEGY
Elevate insights and data to create competitive advantage.
PEOPLE PROCESS TECHNOLOGY DATA

Create a cross- Foster iterative Implement a Capture, manage,
functional insights insight development technology and secure data
organization and within governance architecture to from all sources
culture. and measurement ensure closed-loop and make it
processes. learning and accessible for
optimization. insights.
FIGURE 5 Advanced Insights Firms Are More Adroit Than The Rest Across All Four Aspects Of Insights Discipline
Advanced insights-business are much more adroit than the rest across all four
aspects of insights discipline
Beginner maturity level

Intermediate maturity level
Advanced maturity level
73% 73%
69% 69%
43% 43%
41% 41%
29% 30% 29%

28%
We follow We collaborate with all We are held We execute this in all

documented relevant departments/ accountable teams/functions within
and repeatable groups within the by one senior the organization.
processes. organization. leader.
Base: 24,142 global data and analytics decision makers who have seniority level of manager or above
What It Means
Get Ready For The Insights Disruption

Across the globe and across all markets, insights-driven practices are still relatively immature. About
nine in 10 firms have failed to reach an advanced insights maturity level and therefore don’t deliver
ongoing competitive advantage using insights.18 However, the situation will rapidly change:
›› Senior leadership will move from insights awareness to insights execution. In the last few
years, Forrester has fielded questions from executive leaders who want to understand why they
should care about being insights driven. The conversation for many has now moved on to how to
execute on an insights vision. Starbucks is injecting digital insights into its mobile ordering app to
help personalize and optimize experiences. Within the next 12 months, we expect that most firms
will have kick-started enterprisewide insights programs.
›› Insights will transform digital transformation. Digital transformation is continually changing

business processes and customer engagement using the latest in digital and automation
technology.19 To date, new technology capabilities are driving most of this transformation, but we
expect this to shift to a focus on data- and insights-backed decisions. Firms that recently released
new eCommerce websites, mobile apps, and connected kiosks are starting to instrument them
with data and analytics. This will inform optimized engagements and future releases. As insights
practices across industries mature, CIOs should expect digital transformation to be guided more
intelligently by data, analytics, and experimentation (AKA the insights process).
›› The insights ecosystem will continue to explode. Just keeping up with what the competition
is doing with insights requires a rate of change that isn’t possible with organic self-transformation
approaches. To accelerate to the speeds required, CIOs need help from external technology and
services partners. Vendors such as Accenture, Adobe, Deloitte, IBM, and Oracle are in a race to
offer an ever-increasing array of insights services and technology solutions. And the number and
types of vendors are growing by the day.
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Supplemental Material
Survey Methodology
The Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018, was fielded
between February and March 2018. This online survey included 2,879 respondents in Australia, Canada,
China, France, Germany, India, the UK, and the US from companies with 100 or more employees.
Forrester Analytics’ Business Technographics ensures that the final survey population contains only
those with significant involvement in the planning, funding, and purchasing of business and technology
products and services. Research Now fielded this survey on behalf of Forrester. Survey respondent
incentives include points redeemable for gift certificates.
Please note that the brand questions included in this survey should not be used to measure market
share. The purpose of Forrester Analytics’ Business Technographics brand questions is to show usage
of a brand by a specific target audience at one point in time.
Endnotes
See the Forrester report “Insights-Driven Businesses Set The Pace For Global Growth.”
1
Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.
2
3
FastWorks, used by staff and customers, describes a rigorous process for measuring the effects of new ways of
4
doing things by testing assumptions and/or gathering customer validation. Using data and analytics, the framework
encourages insights-driven innovation that is intended to provide competitive differentiation. Source: “What is
FastWorks,” GEreports, November 16, 2017 (https://gereports.ca/fastworks/).
5
“Systems of insight” is not just a new way to say business intelligence or big data analytics. Rather, it’s an evolution of
6
these. See the Forrester report “The Anatomy Of A System Of Insight.”
Base: global data and analytics decision makers whose firms are adopting systems of insight (beginner or advanced
7
maturity level). Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.
Base: global data and analytics decision makers whose firms are adopting systems of insight (beginner or advanced
8
maturity level). Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.
See the Forrester report: “Gauge Your Insights-Driven Business Maturity.”

9
10
11
Base: global data and analytics decision makers whose firms (of advanced insights maturity level) have or are planning
to have a chief analytics officer. Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics
Survey, 2018.
12
Our survey showed that 94% of respondents were either relying or increasing their reliance on quantitative decision
making or were interested in starting to become reliant on quantitative decision making. Also, there was a marked
difference between beginner, intermediate, and advanced firms in this regard: 42% of advanced firms were actively
expanding their management culture around quantitative decision making, while only 28% and 16% of intermediate
and beginner firms, respectively, were doing the same. Source: Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics
Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.
13
To accelerate an insights-driven transformation, many companies appoint data leadership. Half of firms have
appointed a chief data officer, and 47% have appointed a chief analytics officer. Source: Forrester Analytics Global
Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.
See the Forrester report “Insights-Driven Businesses Appoint Data Leadership.”

14
See the Forrester report “Insights-Driven Businesses Set The Pace For Global Growth.”
15
Base: global data and analytics decision makers who have seniority level of manager or above. Source: Forrester
Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.
16
See the Forrester report “Gauge Your Insights-Driven Business Maturity.”
17
Forrester describes four steps for organizations to follow when creating a strategy for enterprise-level transformation
to insights. Step 1: Determine urgency by examining the performance of existing investments. Step 2: Create and
maintain communication of the mission to become insights driven. Step 3: Assess and sequence the focus on the five
insights-driven competencies. Step 4: Plot the road map to transformation. See the Forrester report “Four Essential
Steps To Transform To An Insights-Driven Business.”
18
Base: global data and analytics decision makers who have seniority level of manager or above. Source: Forrester
Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.
Technology transforms everything businesses do — and technology will always be changing. Hence digital
19
transformation is a never-ending journey. Digital transformation is in a sorry state because of confusion about what
it is, what it can do, and how to do it as well as the ongoing war between old-school technophobe leaders and
technology innovators. See the Forrester report “The Sorry State Of Digital Transformation In 2018.”
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Licensed for individual use only

The State Of Insights-Driven Business Maturity,

Why Read This Report Key Takeaways

Firms Must Accelerate Their Insights Maturity,

The State Of Insights-Driven Business Maturity, 2019

Table Of Contents Related Research Documents

6 The Opportunity Is Now To Differentiate On

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

While The Insights Journey Is Hard, Getting There Is Worth It

FIGURE 1 Few Firms Have Advanced Insights-Driven Businesses

Distribution of insights-driven business maturity levels

Advanced Firms Turn To Systems Of Insight To Deliver Market Differentiation

2. Identify outcomes and

5. Test and implement

FIGURE 3 Firms With Advanced Insights Practices Outcompete Beginners

Advanced insights-driven-businesses, compared with beginners, are:

178% more likely to grow revenues

228% more likely to be good at

240% more likely to create sustainable

Advanced Insights-Driven Businesses Have Strong Leadership

The Opportunity Is Now To Differentiate On Insights

›› Measure insights maturity to assess opportunities. Without a methodical approach to analyzing

FIGURE 4 Insights-Driven Businesses Are Highly Competent In Five Organizational Areas

PEOPLE PROCESS TECHNOLOGY DATA

Beginner maturity level

29% 30% 29%

We follow We collaborate with all We are held We execute this in all

Get Ready For The Insights Disruption

›› Insights will transform digital transformation. Digital transformation is continually changing

Engage With An Analyst

Analyst Inquiry Analyst Advisory Webinar

Forrester’s research apps for iOS and Android.

these. See the Forrester report “The Anatomy Of A System Of Insight.”

See the Forrester report: “Gauge Your Insights-Driven Business Maturity.”

See the Forrester report “Insights-Driven Businesses Appoint Data Leadership.”

Forrester’s research and insights are tailored to your role and

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