What a strange phenomenon this concept of “adulting” is. Have you heard about this? Basically, avid social media users (read: millennials) are posting updates about or photos of themselves’ partaking in activities that are characteristic of adulthood and then tagging those posts with the term “adulting” (author’s note: on principle, I refuse to use that term without quotation marks).

While this trend may seem to be yet another example of English speakers’ penchant for verbifying nouns (see what I did there?), it, in fact, illustrates people’s self-awareness when it comes to their respective maturity levels. And while there has certainly been some backlash to the use of the word “adulting,” this display of understanding where one stands in terms of individual maturity is actually a good thing.

The same can be said for understanding business functions’ analytics maturity levels and how they compare to each other.

Source: Comparing Analytics Maturity (Infographic)

APQC recently completed some research that explored which functional areas have the highest analytics maturity and what types of challenges organizations are facing as they work to develop their analytics capabilities. Here’s a spoiler: organizations are generally pretty mature when it comes to analytics, particularly in their sales and marketing functions, but not nearly as mature as they’d like to be.

So, in a sense, organizations are “adulting” with analytics, insofar as they’re starting to exhibit mature analytics behavior, but they still have a long way to go before they reach full maturity. Hopefully all the hashtaggers out there who just paid their own taxes for the first time appreciate, as the organizations in APQC’s research seem to, that “adulting” does not an adult make.

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