Empower Your Employees with Data and the Skills to Use It

[Christina Pizzella]

Recently, avid technology blogger, Phil Simon, wrote a thought-provoking three-part blog series discussing the advantages of empowering employees with data. Specifically, he brought up the idea of enabling employees to use that data to make informed business decisions without having to constantly make trips to IT. Progress Easyl, part of our Progress Pacific platform, does exactly that; it enables marketing and sales operations professionals to access, combine, collaborate and report on data from all of their data sources in one place, without having to depend on IT!

In part one of Phil Simon’s blog series, he discusses the role of “gatekeeping” data and how it has evolved. Roughly fifteen years ago, when Simon entered the corporate world, if you wanted data, you had to go through IT. The taxing process of formally requesting data access and waiting for approval could take weeks at a time! Today many companies are taking steps to eliminate this detour through IT. To this point, Simon explains how employees are able to meet their own data needs without IT.

Part two of Simon’s blog series is focused around two benefits of employee data self-service: increased efficiency and personal responsibility. If IT is no longer the data middle-man, employees have the ability to make quicker, and more informed business decisions, but can also be held fully accountable for such decisions.

In Simon’s third and final part of the blog series, he explains that companies who decide to trust their employees with data and empower them to use it benefit with more skilled employees and better results. He says granting employees access forces them to combine hard data with creativity and intuition to better solve problems. The hope there is that employees will bring about new ideas to drive innovation, cost savings or revenue opportunities for the business.

Interested in reading more? Visit Phil Simon’s blog and read the series for yourself. Better yet, learn more about how you can empower your employees with data and the skills to use it with Progress Easyl!

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