India, May 9 -- If you are looking to get your executive team to invest in your data analytics strategy, you may want to put together a slide deck that shows the potential benefits, the risks of not pursuing such a strategy, the required capital budget for the project, and the expected ROI. That's a pretty straightforward way to approach the C-suite.

Or you could follow an alternative approach. Instead of telling them what you want to do, show them.

That's what Mike Cuddy did. The vice president of IT and CIO at Toromont Industries, a company that sells and services industrial assets such as heavy industrial equipment for construction and mining, followed an approach he learned from another IT leader at an Interop/InformationWeek event ...