Providing organizations with reliable data for better decision-making is an undertaking that has not fundamentally changed in decades. Despite massive technology advances and new tactics, the IT organization managing data infrastructure today still has the same overall mission: moving data from its moment of creation and making it accessible and understandable by decision-makers at the moment of need.

However, while the objective has stayed the same, the obstacles to successfully create and maintain a source of analytical truth within a business have become exponentially more difficult.

This paper seeks to outline three major thought shifts concerning the modern data environment that IT leaders need to understand in order to support data-driven decision making within their organization.