Unlocking the power of data collaboration

It’s almost a cliché now– businesses regard data as their most valuable asset. But companies only truly realize the value of their data when stakeholders have access to all relevant data sources, both internal and external. So how can your business unlock its power to generate more valuable insights from the full range of data available? Let’s look at how businesses can improve their data collaboration practices to improve results.

What is data collaboration?

Data collaboration is a process that involves gathering, sharing, and exchanging data in a unified manner from multiple sources so that domain experts, teams, and data-sharing partnerships can use combined insights to create new value. From this definition, it’s important to understand that data collaboration can happen both internally and externally. 

Benefits of data collaboration

Access more internal data

Internally, collaboration across business units can help domain experts to combine information and together derive new insights. These insights could improve customer experience, help understand the performance of new technologies, or help solve any number of business problems. In a world where 68 percent of enterprise data  goes unused for analytics projects, data collaboration brings teams together to identify and leverage the full range of internal data that can help meet business objectives. 

Leverage the power of external data

Externally, collaboration with a strategic partner lets both parties benefit from the abundance of useful information that often exists outside of their own respective IT environments. Partnerships could be with resellers, vendors, companies with which your business shares an interest, channel partners, consultants, or even commercial data provider platforms. Combining external and internal information potentially unlocks new insights about customer behavior, markets, supply chains, and the competitive landscape in which you operate. 

Get insights faster

Fostering an environment of data collaboration inherently brings people together from different areas of expertise, different business units, and different organizations. The result is that shared perspectives and expertise on a wider variety of information help to identify opportunities and unearth insights faster. In an increasingly fast-paced and dynamic digital world, speed matters in getting data-driven insights.  

Obstacles to data collaboration

If data collaboration was easy, every business would be doing it and getting the most value from the information assets at their disposal. In the real world, several obstacles hamper effective data collaboration efforts—here are three of the most persistent challenges. 

Data silos

A crucial tenet of data collaboration is unimpeded access to the data internal to your organization, no matter where it resides. The reality for most companies though is that data silos exist everywhere, with information being scattered across and locked into a disparate variety of SaaS and on-premises applications used by different business units. Each of these apps creates its own database silo. This is all made more challenging when organizations adopt new data sources, as many did during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to related challenges caused by data sprawl.

When there are internal silos, data is hard to discover and access. In an IT environment defined by internal data silos, data consumers (people or applications that use data) don’t know about or cannot access highly relevant data locked away in other parts of the business, including first-party data directly collected from customers.  

Security and privacy challenges

The default attitude of many business leaders in a tightly regulated data privacy landscape is to exercise extreme caution around how data is shared and with whom, both inside and outside the company. This attitude is understandable given that a breach of sensitive customer information comes with hefty costs from penalties, legal issues, and reputational damage. 

Beyond threats to customer information, there is also the potential to reveal trade secrets that only privileged individuals should see, sensitive company or employee information, and more. These security and privacy challenges arise with both internal and external sharing. Sharing data with the right security and privacy controls in place (e.g. sharing only portions of a table, encrypting data in motion and at rest) is imperative in overcoming this obstacle. 

Lack of trust

The point of data collaboration is to bring all available data together to enhance business outcomes. This naturally involves exchanging data with third parties, and, more importantly,  trusting those third parties with a valuable business asset. Hesitance to trust a third party can stymie data collaboration and lead to missing out on useful insights. Critical in overcoming this obstacle is to exercise due diligence and tightly control the information shared. 

This trust challenge works both ways; data consumers might have difficulty trusting the quality of information shared with them by external partners. It’s essential to understand how this data was compiled, how accurate it is, and how up-to-date it is. Without trust in the data, you may not want to use it. 

How RecordPoint can help

RecordPoint provides a modern, intelligent Data Trust Platform that assists with data collaboration efforts in the following ways:

Centralized data inventory

When data is scattered and records are managed across different systems, it’s much harder to collaborate. RecordPoint’s centralized data management ensures information is easy to find and generate insights. This centralized management ensures compliance using the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the background to classify and protect data based on the content and context of the information. 

Federated records management

Easily find whatever you’re looking for from a single, centralized, user-friendly dashboard to upgrade discovery and ensure data collaboration efforts run efficiently, no matter the location or format of data. Federated management also helps to break down those barriers and internal silos between departments. 

Connectors⁠

Leverage the wealth of information available in your IT environment with Connectors to hundreds of essential business systems containing treasure troves of useful information. You can also detect and protect sensitive data across your data estate to overcome the security and privacy obstacles of data collaboration. 

With RecordPoint, you can overcome data collaboration challenges, start unlocking insights, and generate value from your most valuable asset.