Williams Sonoma Reading: "Since becoming CEO, I've worked to bring our information technology and e-commerce teams closer to the brands. We've centralized and integrated our marketing, analytics, and IT functions so that we can more easily share and execute on ideas and information that benefit the entire group. We also created two new senior vice president roles: One SVP heads a combined e-commerce engineering and marketing group, reporting to both our CIO and our CMO, and the other oversees multichannel direct marketing across our brand portfolio."

MIT Sloan Reading: "the most appropriate modus operandi would be to approach analytics projects as partnerships between the business side and IT."

Davenport and Harris Reading: P121: "...IT must work more aggressively to integrate and standardize enterprise data in anticipation of radically increased demand from users."

Question 2:

Drawing upon the sample quotes above and others from the readings, outline why partnering closely with information technology is so important to building a business analytics capability?