Data Exchanges
Through data exchange, data is shared between organizations and systems seamlessly from the source schema to the target schema without data being altered or changed.
What is a data exchange?
Data exchange is done through a data marketplace or data web store (but that doesn’t necessarily mean that data is sold; a data web store can also facilitate sharing of data) with a select group of organizations or individuals, where data is made available through publishing so that it can be discovered by members of the group. Data exchanges can be private only to specific participants or public where exchanges of large amounts of data from various industry verticals and sectors are encouraged. AWS is an example of a large public data exchange service.
Why are data exchanges important?
Organizations of all sizes in all industries realize that the vast amounts of data available can be leveraged in several ways, from generating additional revenue streams to improving processes, business operations, and much more. There are limitless advantages to organizations that augment their data with that of third parties. Taking advantage of the ability to share data with other key players can no longer be ignored; it must be embraced for a business to be successful in the modern world.
According to Gartner, by 2023 85% of data sharing strategies that include external sources will drive revenue-generating digital business outcomes rather than data management functions, making data sharing an essential business capability.
Main benefits of data exchanges
Reduce time to market
The time it takes to break into new markets or discover untapped opportunities within existing ones can be significantly lessened by augmenting internal data with third-party data sets. From a strategic business perspective, gathering as much information as possible to support data-driven decision-making makes sense.
Break down data silos
Through a data exchange ecosystem, data silos that naturally build up within departments, partners, and business units can be broken down due to ease of data transfer.
Control and govern access to your data
Just because data is being exchanged doesn’t mean that you lose control over it. Data exchange platforms allow you to control and govern access to your data regardless of whom you’re sharing it.
Challenges of data exchanges and how to overcome them
For most organizations, data monetization isn’t their core business, so they opt to use data marketplaces to sell their data. But using marketplaces as a single marketing source comes with a problem. Data marketplaces are controlled by a single operator, who is usually a cloud provider. This limits a company’s ability to display custom products and test different listings. Getting the right technology in place to distribute monetized data makes data discovery, marketing, and dissemination significantly smoother.
Seller Differentiation
Typical data web stores opt for standardization over customization to keep their UI intact. Metadata is of course used, but the styling of all data listings looks the same or very similar, not allowing for much differentiation for sellers. Further, these platforms don’t work like search engines, so similar data product listings may get obfuscated by other sellers depending on when you list them.
Solution: A fully Customizable Web Store
Your Revelate data web store is fully customizable to reflect the experience you want to provide, with self-service options for external customers and differentiated internal access options for employees and partners.
Technical Expertise
Effectively navigating packaging and productizing your organization’s data sets can be difficult without the proper technical expertise. To get the full benefit from using data, the challenges of integration, interoperability, context-specific governance, and categorization must be addressed by the organization itself since a typical data exchange doesn’t do it. This is compounded by the fact that data exchanges facilitate bringing data from multiple sources together, adding to the effort that an organization needs to put in to manage it all effectively.
Solution: Automations
Relevate’s automations that handle moving datasets from various sources, preparing them, packaging them in specific configurations based on customer need, and placing them on your data web store. This eliminates any requirement for technical expertise to fulfill data orders, taking the burden off IT and allowing anyone, such as salespeople or other internal employees, to fulfill data orders quickly and easily.
Data Discovery
Many data exchange platforms don’t offer the ability to filter and customize data sets, making it difficult for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for in a sea of data products. Further, your organization may have a specific way of classifying datasets that don’t align with the limitations of a typical data exchange platform.
Solution: Data Set Categorization
Creating a fully customized web store through Relevate allows you to incorporate the categorization aspects your company uses for datasets, resulting in a tailored experience that fits your business objectives.
Managing the Governance of Combined Data
While typical data exchanges make bringing data together easy, there are still the essential steps of data governance, integration, and interoperability. Organizations must take great care to address these challenges before they can gain optimal business value from the data they’re getting from data exchanges.
Data obtained from a data exchange should be carefully assessed to ensure it’s correct and appropriate. If documentation isn’t provided or doesn’t provide all the context surrounding the dataset, such as the context that the data was initially used, its consistency in time, its relationship to other data, and other metrics and rules, then it should be used with caution.
Share your data with confidence
Get all the benefits of data exchange while effectively managing your data governance with Relevate.
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