Accelerating digital business is top of mind for high-performing enterprises. D&A leaders should implement trust-based data sharing, internally and externally, to speed digital transformation. Digital transformation cannot exist without data. Yet many organizations inhibit access to data, preserving data silos and discouraging data sharing. This unnecessarily undermines efforts to maximize business and social value from data and analytics — at a time when COVID-19 is driving demand for data and analytics to unprecedented levels.
D&A leaders have a path forward by adopting the Gartner “must share data unless” model. The model has five steps to take, starting with targeting digital business outcomes and recalibrating risk to uncover the lost opportunities from failing to share data. Then focus on establishing trust mechanisms for data, including metadata, and for the data source the technology creating or transmitting the data, and the internal roles handling ingested data. The IT environment should then adapt to data sharing, recognizing it as a business necessity to enable digital business, including adopting adaptive data governance to maximize the benefits of sharing data. The final step is to engage in the augmented data ecosystem, leveraging increased data availability to create more robust analytics or to train AI algorithms in support of digital business. Organizations that promote data sharing will outperform their peers on most business value metrics, including accelerating digital business.