Question: In the topic material, "Data-Driven Companies Outperform Competitors Financially," Thor Olavsrud discusses the path to becoming a data-driven company. As an IT professional, discuss strategies you can employ to encourage corporate leaders to utilize available data to drive decision making. Provide examples of ways IT professionals can facilitate the sharing of data-related information with employees, collect data efficiently across departments, and present data in ways that allow company executives to make decisions based on data. Cite specific industry examples from your own research and include links to related articles in your posts.

Student answer: I love the quote from Elissa Fink, "Making data available and easy to use for all employees can transform an organization's culture. It's good for the company's bottom line" (Olavsrud, 2013). It is important that we do not leave data to one individual or small group but instead help all employees data aware and capable. I agree that training all employees to be more data literate is highly important. By integrating data into everyday operations for all employees a company will be better able to maximize the use of data and promote sharing of data through all departments. When everyone is data minded we will have more minds to sift through data and possibly pick up things that might have been missed as each individual looks at the data from a different mindset and can pick up things one person might miss.

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