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A data-driven organization is one that puts data to work to improve business outcomes, both by
using data to drive a rigorous decision process and by making the data available for stimulating
innovation and providing value to customers. When data is locked into an inflexible framework,
siloed, or difficult to get at, it becomes a barrier to business agility, preventing the company
from responding to opportunities or from getting products to market quickly. Even worse, when
a business doesn't drive its processes and investments through the use of data, it is foregoing
important contact with the market it is trying to serve or passing up feedback that could help it
succeed better in its initiatives. A data-driven organization, on the other hand, uses data to gain
agility and uses agility to make its data more valuable.
In closing
Mark Schwartz,
Enterprise Strategist, AWS
About the Author
Mark Schwartz is an enterprise strategist at Amazon Web
Services and the author of The Art of Business Value, A Seat
at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, and War and
Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in
the Digital Age. Before joining AWS, he was the CIO of the US
Citizenship and Immigration Service (part of the Department of
Homeland Security), CIO of Intrax, and CEO of Auctiva. He has
an MBA from Wharton, a BS in Computer Science from
Yale, and an MA in Philosophy from Yale.
Read more from Mark Schwartz »
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