Data-driven decisions are better decisionsit's as simple as that. Using big data enables managers to decide on the basis of evidence rather than intuition. For that reason it has the potential to revolutionize management. A team of researchers wanted to test the hypothesis that data-driven companies would be better performers. They conducted structured interviews with executives at 330 public North American companies about their organizational and technology management practices, and gathered performance data from their annual reports and independent sources. Sifting through the results, the team observed that the more companies characterized themselves as data-driven, the better they performed on objective measures of financial and operational results. They found that companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competitors. This performance difference remained robust after accounting for the contributions of labor, capital, purchased services, and traditional IT investment. It was statistically significant and economically important and was reflected in measurable increases in stock market valuations. How much trust would you put into the above evidence that using big data intelligently improves business performance