To Empower or not to Empower

Hello everyone,

as I began following news on how Big Data may create opportunities for organizations I also wondered about how organizations might have to change in order to reach these opportunities.

My sense is that, assuming organizations have the technology in place to analyze big data, the most important thing is the ability of people to ask the right quesitons when interrogating data.

Then a question is: do you think organizations should empower employees more? In other words, should companies design ways for employees to advance their ideas as to which data analyses to pursue? For example: one employee may come out and say: I think that our customers are favoring product X of our competitor to ours…then an analysis of social networks could be carried out in order to see customer relative perception of the two products…

To conclude, there are several opportunities from using Big Data (are there?) and because managerial attention is limited, employees empowerment may increase the probability of getting value from data…

What do you think?