Many organizations are striving to become data-driven, but few are truly achieving it. Successful organizations have managed to identify the business drivers and benefits of collaboration and data sharing within a secure and governed environment.
What is a Data Marketplace?
The concept of Data Marketplace is something relatively new in the field of Data Management and comes from e-commerce and typical portals born on the Internet for buying and selling products and services. Just as we buy almost anything on Amazon, rent vacation homes on Airbnb or search for cars on Cars.com, the purpose of a Data Marketplace is to facilitate the exchange of data between producers and consumers in a controlled environment.
A Data Marketplace can be external, i.e., it can be used to exchange data between different organizations or even at the individual level (e.g., buying and selling data, sharing data for research, open data portals, …), or it can be internal, where the information is made available only in the controlled environment of an organization or group of organizations.
On a practical level, an internal data marketplace is based on the construction of a controlled bazaar where all appropriate information assets are made available to potential consumers by different producers within the governed environment of an organization and based on the organization’s data strategy.
What are the benefits for an organization of building an internal Data Marketplace?
According to Gartner:
- Data teams are twice as likely to generate measurable benefits from external data sharing and 3 times more from internal sharing of data assets with their partners and collaborators.
- By 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly consider information as a critical business asset and data analysis as an essential competency.
- By 2023, organizations that promote data sharing will outperform their competitors on most business value metrics.
- Data sharing is a business necessity to accelerate digital business (December 2020)
- Organizations that list data sharing as a business necessity rather than a Data Management function will perform better in digital business and be more successful than their competitors (February 2021).
Thus, an internal Data Marketplace aims to simplify the entire data value chain and the required processes for sharing governed and quality data among the different stakeholders of an organization, providing the following benefits:
- Greater understanding of the data assets available in the organization and greater contextual information facilitating self-service of data for better and faster decision making.
- Facilitates the achievement of the objectives set by the organization thanks to the sharing of high-quality governed data.
- Increased efficiency and maximization of synergies across projects, areas, and departments thanks to the reuse of data and processes derived from the democratization of data.
- Improved employee productivity and satisfaction: less time and effort spent searching for, understanding, and requesting access to data; less time and effort spent preparing and cleaning data for exploitation; less time and effort spent fixing errors in data generation and processing.
- Increased quality of data shared by producers and made available for use by third parties.
- Increased transparency and trust in data assets and related processes by stakeholders.
- Possibility of discovering new uses for the data available in the organization and generating new products and services.
- Reduction of time-to-market and time-to-value in the launch of new products and services based on data analysis.
- Cost reduction (maintenance, infrastructure, operations, development, impacts, …) thanks to the simplification and automation of common technical processes and manual data management processes.
- Prevention of potential impacts and reduction of operational risks derived from the processes inherent to the data lifecycle (manual errors, security breaches, …).
- Facilitation of data monitoring and data governance through automation and decentralization of processes, standardization of data access management and integration with demand management.
- More effective valuation and monetization of data based on high-quality governed data that is usable for operations and decisions.
- Improved regulatory and normative compliance in the use of data, facilitating auditing and evidence gathering.
Conclusion
As we can see, building an internal Data Marketplace can bring a great number of benefits to an organization, but it is very important to always develop a clear strategy, starting by identifying some specific business drivers, goals, and reasons for managing data. Based on these goals and objectives, the organization should define the corresponding metrics and KPIs that will allow it to measure the impact of these benefits and discover whether the organization is truly achieving them.
