Imagine a situation where a burger company operating in New Jersey wants to understand the new ingredients it must come up with for a fitness-conscious area in Boston. It suddenly realizes that it needs to know what ailments are common in that area so that the customers can be convinced of no potential adverse effects of the new ingredients. Therefore, data on health issues is the new wealth that this burger company needs to acquire. Health-related data in demand by a fast-food company? Sounds a little unusual, isn’t it?
However, that’s the new reality of the day. Companies need data on areas which have not been their focus areas traditionally. A media company may need education history of a state to understand what kind of programs must be broadcasted in that region, while a textile manufacturing company may need climate change data to understand what kind of new fabric must be manufactured for customers to deal with new climate of the future. However, belonging to an altogether different domain may limit their capability to aggregate quality data. A fast-food company may not be able to gather data on health and diseases of a region through its data on sales or customer behavior or demographics of the region. This is where companies may need to access datasets which exist with other entities in an altogether different business line. The best way to solve this lack of access to data is to create a platform for all entities in a network to have visibility over data residing with other entities too. Enters Data Exchange!
Data silos across the world
The apathy of the data-driven world is not the absence or lack of datasets, but the lack of visibility and access. Companies are often not aware of the data silos that exist within the organization itself. A multinational company may have one of its business units carrying a repository of data on new User Experience trends in the market, while the other business unit that needs the data may not even know that a team already has it. The latter team may spend days together to aggregate the data which is already existing inside the organization. Such data silos are a bane for the company’s treasury.
The same happens at a macro scale as well. Companies may spend time doing market research on the very same subject that another company has already done it survey on. Such a dataset containing volumes of valuable information may be sitting idle in some corner of the company’s database, while it has the potential to be sold with anonymity and earn revenues instead of being a dead wood.
Data Exchange Platforms
Platforms that bring all datasets from various entities, be it different teams in a company, or various companies in a corporate network, are called Data Exchanges. A data exchange allows for entities, or let’s call them participants, to upload their datasets after cleaning and appropriate transformation and exchange it with other participants. Each participant can share its dataset, can access others’ datasets to which they are allowed and can use the tools on cloud to run analytics and operations on the datasets. The Data Exchange allows for datasets to break free of the prison of their owners and fly to other entities that see value in them. Data exchanges facilitate research, innovation and opportunities for enterprises and enable the data-driven business strategy for expansion, diversification and operationalization. Companies find it challenging to acquire data from various purposes, partially because of lack of manpower to conduct the market survey or lack of financial strength to maintain a database, as it comes at a cost. If companies have an option of utilizing a dataset created by some other companies, research organization or academia, it will lead to cost savings, faster turnaround and deeper insights.
Path-breaking features to enable swift analytics
Data exchange not only allows entities, like companies, research institutions and individual academicians, to view others’ datasets and share their own with the world, but also to run analytics on the data on cloud. Data exchanges also provide analytical tools that derive insights on the datasets on the cloud itself, without any need of downloading the dataset or the analytical tool. Participants can derive insights from the datasets in real-time and can add their interpretations to it, and then share it back again with all the other participants in the network.
Moreover, participants can also choose which kind of other participants they want to share their data with. For example, a fast food company may be willing to share food consumption trends with state health department, or with food farming organizations, or maybe with students studying hotel management. However, it may not want to share the data with other competing fast food firms. That granular level of access control is made possible by data exchanges. Participants can choose who can see their data, if they can download or just view it, and if analytics algorithms can be run over them. This way, selective access will be granted on the data exchange platform.
Automated billing based on usage-monitoring can be enabled in the data exchanges. Time-based billing will check for the usage time by participant and will calculate the price on per-hour or per-minute basis. Value-based pricing can check for how many insights have been derived by the participant or how complex algorithms have been put to use in the process, in order to bill the participant accordingly. Participants can also form small groups in the platform to exchange datasets and insights with each other in a much secure manner for some confidential collaborative projects.
Blockchain for transparency and payments
Smart contracts can be put in place to enable transparency and timeliness in payments. The moment a participant signs up for a dataset or for insights derived by some other participant, a smart contract will kick in and metering will begin on the duration or value derived by the participant from the data exchange services. The time-based pricing models or value-based pricing models can be easily programmed into the system and when a participant logs out, the contract executes to process the payment.
Final thoughts
Data and insights exchanges have already started booming in the technology world and with the enterprises indulging increasingly in data-driven strategies, data exchanges will grow to prominence as they enable worldwide collaboration and facilitation of innovation and business strategy. Data exchanges will be key enabler for marketing, product strategy and innovation in companies and will be the platform to kickstart mind-blowing research. The enterprise of tomorrow is going to be even more data-driven in its DNA and data exchanges will make data-driven strategy a feasible reality.
