Data-Sharing Done Right: Finding the Best Business Approach
It’s an accepted fact that we have more data at our disposal now than ever before. Data informs every aspect of business – from collecting customer information right through to the end of the data pipeline by fuelling day-to-day operations – and is only increasing in importance as businesses innovate with AI applications.
With cloud platforms, organisations have a dedicated place to store the huge quantities of data, which has enabled businesses to collect even more vast quantities of structured and unstructured data. This presents a challenge, though: as more and more data is collected and stored in the cloud, it quickly becomes decentralised and difficult to govern, in turn making it difficult for data consumers to find the information they are looking for. This now begs the question of many businesses: what use is all this data, if business users cannot find what they need?
To ensure data is not only available, but also accessible to those that need it, businesses recognise that it is vital to focus on collecting, sorting and governing all the data in their organisation. But what happens when data also needs to be accessed and shared across the business? That is where organisations discover a sticking point.
A unified data approach
As a way of attempting to manage this vast ocean of data, many organisations have turned to data catalogs. These tools provide information on the data stored by an organisation, which is a crucial tool for data engineers which makes it easier to find and understand the data they are looking for – think of a data catalog like a large inventory list that allows data product builders to quickly search and find all the material they need for a project.
Data catalogs are important to an organisation serious about getting the most from its data, empowering engineers and the builders of data products with the information they need to transform that ocean of data into meaningful tools for the rest of the business. They are not, however, a one size fits all solution to the challenge of making data discoverable, governable and accessible.
Looking beyond the data catalog
The more that organisations rely on data for day-to-day activities, the more important it is to ensure that data can serve the right purpose for those who are using it. While a data catalog is a key tool for data engineers, it is less useful for business users trying to discover the right data product for their role. For this reason, businesses are increasingly turning to internal data marketplaces to solve the biggest challenges facing data users.
What is a data marketplace?
Traditionally, some businesses have seen data marketplaces as a tool to sell data externally, but their use is far more wide reaching and impactful. Internal data marketplaces offer a variety of benefits for business users around data discoverability and governance that go well beyond the capabilities of a data catalog.
Businesses should think of an internal data marketplace a bit like an app store on a mobile phone. Users can click on the app store and browse the top rated ‘products’ or search for a specific product, and at their fingertips have the ability not only to read about what is and how highly it is rated by others, but also immediately request access to it. It’s that final section that really helps marketplaces stand apart from catalogs – if a business was only using a data catalog, after locating the data asset for their need, the business user would have to make a request with corporate IT and wait for an unspecified period of time, often several weeks, before they would have access to the data. Needless to say, for businesses relying on large amounts of data, this roadblock can cause significant delays and frustrations.
In terms of efficiency, but also in terms of freeing up data engineers to spend more time innovating rather than helping business users with queries, marketplaces are a crucial part of the equation when it comes to getting the most out of a business’s data.
In short, the key difference between a catalog and a marketplace is that they serve two distinct functions: catalogs are great tools for data engineers building your data products, whilst marketplaces are the best way to empower data consumers with those data products that they need.
Achieving the best of both
So, catalog or marketplace – which comes out on top for modern businesses?
The answer is both.
By applying a catalog-only data strategy, organisations are trying to appeal to both types of users – the data builders and data consumers – but not fully addressing the needs of either.
For data engineers, a data catalog means they can identify the right data needed for their product, but in turn creates additional work as they still need to support business users and provide information about each single step in the innovation process. For data consumers, it is simply harder to find what they are looking for and, once they do find it, the process before using that data product can be laborious and lengthy.
On the other hand, combining a data catalog with an end-to-end internal data marketplace gives both users the best outcome. Data consumers can find and access products easily and have the ability to find and learn about the data products at their disposal. For data builders, they can freely make use of catalogs without the need to go back and explain in meticulous detail to business users how they created the product, freeing them up to spend their time working on the products they own and publish.
When it comes to gathering and making data valuable across a business, there really is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, by integrating data catalogs with internal data marketplaces, organisations can make the most of both tools to ensure both data consumers and data builders can have the best possible experience. The impact that data has on an organisation depends highly on the tools and systems used to maximise its value. Gartner predicts that enterprises that share information will outperform those that do not on nearly every business metric; by leveraging the strengths of both catalogs and marketplaces, businesses are setting themselves up to see a better result from their data assets.
