Data can be a source of great competitive advantage, but for many companies it is perishable and an afterthought. We worked with a global software company that had no centralized management of their data. The sales team did not trust what was in their CRM system and marketing did not have a good sense of the products already owned by their customers, so communications were often off-the-mark. We created a business case justification for a $15 million investment in a global data office and when that was approved we went on to build out the capabilities of this team. We put data quality benchmarks in place, established off-shore and near-shore teams to clean and update data based on geographic nuances, created enterprise-wide data owners, and established a senior level data governance steering committee. Their data became so trustworthy that the sales team stopped keeping their own private stash of customer information and the marketing team was able to develop reliable, world-class predictive modeling that identified cross-sell opportunities and attrition-prevention models that increased revenue per customer by 25%. After establishing enterprise-wide data strategy, processes, and measurements, we were asked to put a strategic roadmap in place for a "Big Data" team that was spun off from the Global Data Management team to focus on innovations related to machine learning. These innovations did not just serve sales and marketing, but also identified ways to create operational efficiencies such as: faster product development time and improved employee retention.