UAI’s Analytics Maturity Assessment is the most comprehensive benchmarking survey for enterprise analytics.
“The AMA provides insights based on data and serves as a great measuring stick against our peers in the utility sector.” -Eddy Halter, Evergy
What is the AMA?
This year the Utility Analytics Institute is publishing an updated version of the Analytics Maturity Assessment (AMA) report. The AMA report is based on a comprehensive 57-question survey taken by UAI’s utility members to give them an idea of their analytics maturity across the entire enterprise. The AMA contains seven main dimensions:
- Strategy – the degree to which a utility has defined, developed, and implemented an enterprise analytics strategy
- People – the development and success of the organizational model that supports enterprise analytics.
- Analytics Governance –the capability of a utility to create and manage analytics processes, policies, and information.
- Data Governance –the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of data used in an enterprise, including metadata management.
- Business Process Integration – the degree to which data and analytics drive business processes and inform business KPIs.
- Analytics Capabilities – the current and anticipated capabilities of different business groups to apply basic-to-advanced analytics.
- Technology/Tools – the ability to procure the appropriate tools and technologies, and the management of analytics technology adoption across different business groups.
Each utility who takes the AMA survey receives a maturity score and is plotted on a graph with the rest of the respondent group, so they know where they stand again their peers. The AMA is useful tool for identifying improvement areas as well as areas of success for each utility member’s analytics department.
The Value the AMA brings to Utilities
The AMA is the most comprehensive analytics benchmarking assessment available to utility analytics teams. It allows utilities to understand their maturity versus the industry as a whole and gives an opportunity to compare against their peers.
“The Analytics Maturity Assessment is the flagship study for UAI. Our utility members can use their results to benchmark their progress and evaluate the maturity of their organization compared to that of their peers. The AMA is an integral part of our research library because it is the most comprehensive utility analytics benchmarking study available,” says Gina Weber, Managing Director, UAI.
Furthermore, the utilities who have taken the AMA in previous years—it runs on a bi-annual basis—can track how much progress they have made. Eddy Halter, Sr. Director of Enterprise Analytics at Evergy, finds the AMA useful for this reason. Halter says, “We compare ourselves to prior AMA results as well as in relation to other utilities. We like to see if we are still top quartile or if we have shifted, and if so, why.” The top quartile that Halter mentions refers to the to the z-chart that plots all the utilities who took the AMA that year; the top quartile consists of the highest scorers.
Because the UAI members value collaboration, they share ideas and help each other improve. Halter says he and his team at Evergy have taken advantage of this collaborative atmosphere and reach out to utilities who have scored higher on the AMA. He says, “In the past, we have reached out to other peer utilities that scored higher to understand areas for us to improve. Without the AMA, we wouldn’t have a way to determine our place amongst our peers.”
AMA scores are also a useful tool for promoting analytics internally. At Evergy, they use it show how they are making progress on becoming a data driven organization. “We use the results to support the positive steps we as an organization, have taken to drive a data driven culture and results. It confirms we are on ‘the right path’”, says Halter.
AMA 2022
The Analytics Maturity Assessment survey is currently open to UAI members and will remain open until June 30th. The results of the survey will we published in the AMA report this fall, which will only be available to UAI members.
If you are a UAI member and haven’t take the AMA survey yet, head over to the AMA tab on UAI Connect to find downloadable versions of the survey to share with your team as well as a link to the online survey where you can submit your responses.
The AMA survey and report are for UAI members only. Consider becoming a member today: https://utilityanalytics.com/join/
Erin Hardick is the Sr. Research Analyst for UAI.
