Thomas Davenport in his book "Competing on Analytics" (Harvard Business Press) provides insights into the companies that are leading their industries, through the systematic and strategic use of information and data for competitive advantage.

He recognises 5 distinct stages that companies go through to becoming analytical competitors and leaders in their field.

At what stage is your organisation?

Stage	Distinctive Capability/Level of insights	Questions Asked	Objective	Metrics/measure/value
1. Analytically Impaired	Negligible, "flying blind"	What happened in our business?	Get accurate data to improve operations	None
2. Localised analytics	Local and Opportunistic - may not be supporting  company's distinctive capabilities	What can we do to improve this activity? How can we understand our business better?	Use analytics to improve one or more functional activities	ROI of individual applications
3. Analytical aspirations	Begin efforts for more integrated data and analytics	What's happening now? Can we extrapolate existing trends?	Use analytics to improve a distinctive capability	Future performance and market
4. Analytical Companies	Enterprise wide perspective able to use analytics for point advantage, know what to do to get to the next level, but not quite there	How can we use analytics to innovate and differentiate?	Build broad analytic capability analytics for differentiation	Analytics are an important driver of performance and value
5. Analytical competitors	Enterprise wide, big results, sustainable advantage	What's next? What's possible? How do we stay ahead?	Analytical master - fully competing on analytics	Analytics are the primary driver of performance and value