“The miracle is this: The more we share the more we have.”
~ Leonard Nimoy

The quote above could not be more true, especially for businesses adopting a data-sharing and collaboration attitude. Why?

It is because the data sharing culture is directly linked with improved workforce productivity, enhanced trust among stakeholders, effective utilization of resources across the organization, and much more. 

In this blog post, we will take a dive to understand what data collaboration means and swim our way to explore how it helps in engineering a successful business transformation strategy. 

Let’s get started 🚀

What is Data Collaboration and Sharing?

Data collaboration is a process that involves accumulating data sets from different internal teams like sales, customer support, marketing, ad ops, and many more to build a unified view of data that works as a single source of truth.

In this way, a common view is shared across different verticals of an organization; ultimately breaking down the barriers to accessing data and creating an interoperable environment where the data travels seamlessly across the organization at speed. 

This brings countless benefits to an organization which makes it more efficient in fulfilling long-term goals and solving business challenges.

According to Gartner, businesses encouraging data sharing will outsprint their competitors on various business value metrics by the year 2023.

Importance of Data Collaboration & Sharing

Professionals like data analysts or facilitators (who are in charge of the data in the organization) cannot crack all the different aspects of the data by themselves, decide the relevancy, and present it to the teams for decision making.

Data interpretation is a sophisticated process that requires skills, experience, and career diversity. If the data is misinterpreted, then it is of no use to anyone. 

Nevertheless, when multiple teams look at the unified view of the data and contribute their know-how, it removes the sole dependency on the data analysts to decode its meaning. This collaboration allows transforming the data into a language that all the teams can interpret. 

Moving forward, let’s have a closer look at five important reasons why data collaboration and sharing make your digital assets more valuable.

#1 Speed, Transparency, & Business Agility

Data sharing and collaboration create an interoperable environment where the data travels transparently at speed within the organization which facilitates the following: 

☑️ Stakeholders have access to reliable data that can help them in performing their job roles more efficiently. 

☑️ Seamless exchange of data between disparate teams, departments, and even external partners leading to enhanced business agility. 

☑️ Quick access to information belonging to another department without making any ad hoc requests.

#2 Reduced Overheads & Security Risks

Many businesses are found to juggle between different data tools and solutions where each of these might offer individual capabilities to accumulate, analyze, and organize the data but are not successful to work together for rendering the complete 360-degree portrait of the data.    

The integration of different data tools is a time-consuming, expensive, and risky exercise. However, with data sharing and collaboration, the organizations save themselves from integrating different tools or manually moving the data from siloed locations. 

To put it in the other words, the information management system is streamlined and the expenditures (related to data storage or integration of tools) and security vulnerabilities while transporting data from Location A to Location B are moved out of the possibility.

#3 Strategic Business Position

Gartner has revealed that the organizations sharing the data with external partners have been successful in generating 3x more measurable economic benefits in comparison to others who do not. 

When a data-sharing partnership is incorporated between organizations, it creates an opportunity to exchange mutually beneficial data sets that can help all the parties involved to build up their strategic positions while creating a profitable synergy. 

Furthermore, organizations collecting proprietary data can start monetizing it and develop a new product offering or extend financial support to the existing offerings. 

#4 Generate Reports at Speed

Data collaboration and sharing involve people working together and pooling their knowledge, intelligence, and resources to generate valuable business reports and insights at speed. This helps a lot when the opportunities have an expiration date labeled to them. 

Generating real-time insights, addressing time-sensitive issues, developing new analytics reports, and handling ad-hoc requests are faster when data sharing and collaboration are in practice.  

#5 More Accurate Search 

Data Sharing develops an environment where advanced technological integrations can be made possible. For example, many organizations make use of the technology that allows them to have a Google-like customized search engine to easily navigate vital data assets like queries and tables based on parameters like popularity and relevance. 

This empowers the teams with access to data profiling and usage statistics that allow a better understanding of the data and smart decision-making.

Wrapping it Up

Data sharing and collaboration are important for any organization to maximize its potential and revenue-generating capabilities. The businesses need to adopt a “data-sharing culture” rather than stressing “data ownership” and remove any possible barrier that might prevent the former to go mainstream.

Some of the best practices to promote data sharing involves developing data management procedures, implementing data literacy initiatives to encourage data-sharing, and understanding organizational biases that restrict collaborations.