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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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