Data is widely considered to be the lifeblood of modern organizations, but it’s only as valuable as the insights that can be mined from it. A proper collaborative data ecosystem, complete with infrastructure, analytics, and applications needed to capture and analyze data, helps organizations come together to mine much-needed insights.
These insights help them better understand and cater to their customers’ needs, derive information about their value or supply chains, and enhance their machine learning (ML) capabilities through complete data sets. They unite people, products, and processes, allowing all data owners involved in the ecosystem to work together, overcome challenges and find greater value together than they ever could alone. Most importantly, by sending computations to the data itself, data never has to leave the owner’s environment.
As beneficial as this can be, data collaboration at this level is, unfortunately, still a pipedream for many organizations. The capabilities needed to create a collaborative data ecosystem are far from understood, and managing data across organizations, industries, and regional borders has, until now, proven difficult. Creating one has meant juggling challenges such as individual data policies, IP protection, varying degrees of data maturity, and compliance with local regulations, to name a few.
Thankfully, there is a way for organizations to overcome these obstacles and reap the rewards that collaborative data ecosystems can offer.
The Federated Approach
By building an ecosystem on a federated data platform, all data can remain in the data owner’s secure environment. Providing the platform integrates with existing technologies, tools, and processes, organizations can utilize one another’s data without it ever having to leave the safety of where it’s stored. The result is true data collaboration without the regulatory, security, and privacy hassles that come with data sharing.
Underpinning their data collaboration ecosystem with a federated data platform offers all parties: the opportunity to gain better market access through aligned data and processes, meaningful data standardization, and the chance to develop new intellectual property that’s informed by the insights that are now available to them. All of this is made possible by:
Trustworthy data
Better access to bigger pools of quality data – free from security concerns and regulatory restrictions that once shielded it – allows everyone in the ecosystem to access previously unattainable data and use it to drive analysis, machine learning models, and insights.
Improved accuracy
The more data that’s available to us, the more accurate and data-driven our insights can be. With greater accuracy made possible by greater data access, biases can be eliminated, and outcomes can be trusted.
True transparency
Data typically loses value and history as it crosses borders between regions and organizations. By ensuring it remains traceable and auditable, organizations can rest easy that it complies with regulatory requirements and remains usable and explainable at the same time.
Seamless scalability and repeatability
For a collaborative data ecosystem to be as efficient as possible, the technologies and frameworks supporting it must be scalable as standard so as not to hinder or limit the value organizations can derive from it. By incorporating repeatability across processes, integrations, tools, and technologies, setup challenges can be overcome, and time to value can be accelerated.
Increased interoperability
To maximize the value of the data within an ecosystem, those who can mine the most value must have interoperable access to it. By enabling this, true collaboration, and the insights it brings, can be realized.
Most digitally-driven businesses are by now aware that data is key to unlocking today’s insights that will drive tomorrow’s innovations. That being the case, many are unequipped to unlock its secrets and have yet to realize the importance of appropriate access, increased insights, and benefits to people and profit that can be achieved through a genuinely collaborative data ecosystem.
From unexpected pandemics to cost of living crises and supply chain shortages, there is no shortage of modern challenges for modern businesses. Only those that realize their data potential and embrace and enable data collaboration will be prepared to overcome the next great challenge.
What are Collaborative Data Ecosystems