Introduction

Strategy is best created by establishing synergy among a company’s activities. The success of a strategy depends largely on integrating many activities well, as opposed to excelling at only one. Without synergy among activities, no distinctive or sustainable strategy is possible (Porter, 1996).

Strategic fit among several activities is, therefore, cornerstone for creating and sustaining a competitive advantage. Interlocking and synchronizing several activities is simply more difficult for competitors to emulate. An organization’s competitive position that is established on a system of multiple activities is more sustainable than one built on a single capability/activity.

Establishing a sustainable competitive advantage in analytics, therefore, requires a network of interrelated analytic-centric activities, including: Business Intelligence(BI), Visualization, Data Warehousing (DW), data integration, statistics, and other relevant activities. Companies that know how to leverage their IT resources gain an analytic-enabled competitive advantage (Porter, 1980; Sambamurthy, 2000), which is the basis of Stream Integration’s analytic-enabled competitive advantage research. For the purpose of this paper, the term analytics will represent the comprehensive view that encompasses concepts such as predictive and exploratory analysis, BI, Visualization, DW, and Big Data.

The challenge, when creating an analytic strategy, is to identify which activities to focus on. To that end, our research identifies factors of analytic-centric initiatives that significantly contribute to the overall maturity and success of a program (Gonzales, 2012). Building on this research, coupled with extensive practical application of maturity assessments for leading companies, Stream Integration’s Comprehensive Analytic Maturity Assessment (CAMA) creates an index that measures the analytic-enabled competitive maturity of an organization. The constructs of this index and the metrics on which the constructs are quantified are outlined in Table 1.