Finding the balance between data control and data sharing

sharing is caring; isn’t that what we’re taught from a young age? Sharing is fundamental to human social development. However, as adults, we don’t want to share everything, especially when it comes to our personal information. When we read that data sharing is a business imperative for organizations, we think of divide a little different.

The digital transformation accelerated by the pandemic has highlighted the benefits of large-scale data sharing to fuel innovation; However, enterprise data sharing projects are still struggling to develop.

Businesses shouldn’t be torn between return on investment and the ability to ensure the right and necessary control when discussing data projects. Data control and compliance are key to mitigating risk in an increasingly complex cloud and hybrid landscape. And data sharing is critical to ensuring data is available to everyone who needs and should have access to it to improve business outcomes.

What does the public sector say?

Only recently have governments started to care about technology issues. Today, technology and data are at the forefront of most political agendas. This turn of events coincides with the advent of Web 2.0 and social media platforms where users unknowingly started a new society within our society and had to adopt new legal, ethical and moral rules.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has ushered in a new turning point in the digital world. The European Union has paved the way for a more responsible and transparent data industry. To this end, new initiatives and proposals are emerging worldwide. We’re starting to see the same trend in the US. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) seeks to protect personal information collected by companies and penalizes companies for disclosing such information. Massachusetts is also passing tougher consumer protection laws with the Massachusetts Information Privacy and Security Act (MIPSA). More privacy policies are emerging from state to state.

These proposals aim to provide a framework for organizing data sharing to encourage innovation and collective intelligence for the benefit of society. The COVID-19 contact tracing applications launched in different countries exemplify this phenomenon. Citizens have access to data on the evolution of the pandemic and are encouraged to come forward in the event of a positive test to warn potential contacts.

Serving the common good is also the goal of public sector open data initiatives. Data is provided free of charge to encourage innovation. The applications are numerous, for example in transport or in urban planning. Traffic applications such as Waze use published roadworks data built into the application to provide users with a real-time view of road conditions. After all, sharing data has many advantages.

The growing importance of data democratization

While it is clear that private sector organizations understand the value of a data sharing strategy, existing barriers make implementation difficult. The issues you face are the same for any data project: the technology and its deployment, trust, data governance and compliance, and organizational culture. From a technological perspective, APIs are the foundation upon which any successful data sharing strategy is built.

Developing APIs is the first step in implementing a data sharing strategy. Usually this requires resources and days of developer time. However, new technologies are emerging to simplify the process. For example, data analysts can use solutions that provide standard API libraries that allow access to the information they need within an hour of publishing an API. Access is automatically managed by the tool.

In order to achieve ROI from data exchange, the data must be controlled and trusted. Ensuring data quality is a challenge for 50% of companies. Data quality must be consistently monitored and managers must determine who has access to which data. All of this is part of the data governance and compliance cycle.

A good example of this is retail. Many retail companies have created centralized data sharing systems with encrypted and anonymized data that is securely accessible on-premises or in the cloud. This enables industry leaders to create effective customer experiences.

For example, Office Depot Europe had a large amount of customer and product data stored in different locations and in different applications. The siled data made it really difficult to understand where the data came from or how it should be used to make business decisions. By implementing data sharing solutions, they were able to standardize data processes and saw a 40 percent improvement in data integration speed. This resulted in faster customer decisions and significant cost savings.

These data-driven successes underscore the importance of a data culture across the enterprise.

Nowadays, data exchange projects are mainly driven by business departments – marketing, sales or finance – while IT provides a security framework and technological levers. But the business units have yet to understand each other and eliminate data silos. As data sharing becomes second nature to many organizations and new projects, ultimate success depends on transparency into the data shared with customers and users—and a shared understanding of what that data means.

Felipe Henao Brand is a Senior Product Manager at Talend.