Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (Jacob Moscovitch / Getty Images) Share Apr 8, 2021 | STATESCOOP Data has played a “paramount” role in enabling public officials to issue effective public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic, Drew Erdmann, Missouri’s chief operating officer said on Tuesday, but the journey to foster data-driven decision making in state government wasn’t easy. Speaking at a virtual conference hosted by Tableau, a software analytics company that has contracted with dozens of states and cities to build COVID-19 data dashboards, Erdmann shared Missouri’s struggles last year to initially get public workers on board with the data-sharing and data-collection necessitated by the pandemic. In contrast to the state’s current “dynamic” data environment, Erdmann said, the disparate data sources — some of which came by modern means and some via fax — made sifting through data sets and keeping the state’s public dashboards updated a tall task.