Using Quantitative Analyses to Construct a Capability Maturity Model for Business Intelligence

One important means to explore the strengths and weaknesses of Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives is a comprehensive and accurate BI maturity assessment instrument. It is important that the assessment instrument is transparently developed using the current BI knowledge base. This paper proposes a BI maturity model that is based on an explicit BI maturity concept and using empirical data. The data is transformed into maturity levels by applying the Rasch algorithm and cluster analysis. The resulting BI maturity model is constructed on the basis of 58 items (capabilities). It is comprised of five levels that we choose to label "initiate","harmonize", "integrate", "optimize" and"perpetuate". An evaluation of the model demonstrates its utility.