The Importance of Data Sharing in Organizations
According to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that promote data sharing will outperform their peers on most business value metrics. Gartner says, data and analytics leaders who share data externally generate three times more measurable economic benefits than those who do not.
The impact on business performance due to data sharing is real, and organizations seem to be agreeing to this fact. For example, ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic, ten large pharmaceutical companies undertook collaborative efforts to train their machine learning algorithms on each other’s data to accelerate drug discovery. These companies used digital trust technologies, including blockchain, to share data without compromising confidential or commercial secrets. It is a rare example but shows how organizations can deliver more value when collaborating in sharing data externally — even with competitors — yielding increased value through efficiency and cost savings. Johnson & Johnson is another excellent example. The company participates in the YODA (Yale University Open Data Access) Project to share clinical trial data to test hypotheses, answer new questions, and potentially find life-saving treatments.
So, that begs the question. Why do companies hesitate when it comes to sharing data? Let alone share data outside of the organization’s four walls; companies struggle to share data within the company or across departments and functions. The impact is enormous. Their inability to distribute data leads to silo thinking and business decisions that do not consider all the consequences.
The most significant barrier is that the companies often have a “don’t share data unless” mindset. Many organizations inhibit access to data, create data silos, and discourage data sharing. While there are legitimate reasons not to share certain data types, companies need to take a broader view of cultivating a 360 view of crucial data domains across the enterprise.
Moving from Don’t Share Data to Must Share Data
This shift is hard for many organizations. By making data sharing a business necessity, companies can ensure that the right data is available to the right people at the right time. Here are a few key considerations to successfully facilitate data distribution across your organization.
• Ensure data is of the high quality
• Secure trust in both data and the data-sharing process
• Address the fear of data misuse or misrepresentation
• Fix privacy and confidentiality issues (Ex: PII data needs at-most care due to privacy regulations)
• Ensure business owns and sponsors data sharing initiative and sees the value
• Adopt trusted data initiatives such as master data management, which enable automation of trusted data sharing across the organization
• Leverage data catalog to compile your data from all the enterprise data sources and collect data quality metrics to evaluate data issues
• Prioritize use cases in which increased data sharing will yield maximum business outcomes
My Point of View:
Data hoarding is often due to flawed data, and teams’ resort to not sharing because others’ not as familiar with the data’s flaws might interpret it in a different, non-productive way. My colleague Monica Mullen nicely summarized this in a recent LinkedIn comment. Every organization should have a goal of creating trusted, authoritative data. If they can’t do that, at the very least, they have to allow for transparency on data’s flaws. This point of view sums up everything I feel about data sharing.
I hope some of the thoughts I shared here are useful to you. I would love the opportunity to discuss if you agree or have a different point of view. Leave me a comment or reach out to me on Twitter at @MDMGeek.
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Interesting post, Prash. As French government official said a short while back: “Value from data comes not when you sell it, but when you share it with your wider ecosystem”. While his point of view might possibly apply more to the public sector than to the economy as a whole, I do believe that data sharing, both within and beyond an organisation’s boundaries is of great value to all stakeholders.