Innovation

The ultimate organization is in the Innovation phase. It is not just driven by data, but creates new products, offerings, and services based on data learnings from inside and outside the organization. This phase is when artificial intelligence and machine learning provide invaluable advantages. There are three sub-phases in Innovation: insight, prescriptive, and foresight.

Insight

Insight is data-driven decision making based on what is actually going on in your ecosystem, for example, in your supply chain, product development, or manufacturing.

Prescriptive

While insight is valuable, it requires human interaction, understanding, and intuition. In the next level, prescriptive, your artificial intelligence is suggesting what you should do based on the insight. This can play an important role in your whole organization, as decisions are data-driven from the supply chain all the way through customer acquisition.

Foresight

In this crowning step, the data actually helps create the future. For example, foresight would allow an IT organization to project how much capacity it will need in the future based on historical norms and even factors such as changing conditions with its competitors. Foresight requires a lot of data and training of models, but leads to the ultimate goal of real-time enterprise.

Conclusion?

It’s common to feel stuck in one phase and overwhelmed at the amount of change necessary to move into a new phase of maturity. Each step forward, however, is valuable. For example, perhaps you are in a Centralized stage and can look at meta data management. Is there is an opportunity to move beyond just cleaning the data and now augment it as well? This type of progressive thinking will move you forward on the chain on maturity in managing your information.