Data Collaboration Explained

Businesses are sitting on a goldmine of valuable information waiting to be harnessed. Unfortunately many are falling short of realizing data’s full potential. The challenge lies in the fact that all this data is dispersed among countless ecosystems and applications, each with their own unique structure and formatting.

Data collaboration has the power to bring this data together and help you extract greater value from it. In this blog, we'll explore what data collaboration is, why it's important, and how you can start putting it into action.

What is data collaboration?

Data collaboration is the sharing of data assets between parties with the aim of unlocking new insights, making better decisions, and driving growth and revenue.

There are three main use cases for data collaboration:

1. Sharing data between lines of business: Disseminating data between business units, departments, and teams within an organization to improve coordination and productivity.
2. Acquiring data from external sources: Accessing third-party data from data suppliers and business partners in order to uncover new insights about their customers, their company, and the markets they operate in.
3. Monetizing first-party data assets: Generating revenue by licensing the use of first-party data for a fee.

What are the benefits of data collaboration?

Through the collaboration of data assets, whether it’s between departments of an organization or between whole organizations, both parties can facilitate better decision-making, improve efficiency, and maximize revenue.

Better insights and decision-making

Your organization’s growth and strategy is better when it’s fueled by quality, robust data from multiple sources. The use of diverse external data can illuminate blind spots that you didn’t know you had. You’ll improve insights and facilitate better decision-making.

For instance, with enriched data, you’ll be able to understand your current customers on a deeper level, allowing you to improve products, services, and customer experiences. You’ll also be able to make better informed predictions about the market and your competitors, allowing you to stay ahead of trends. With data-fueled predictions, there will be less surprises to deal with along the way, allowing your teams to focus on important growth initiatives instead of cleaning up messes.

Increased productivity and efficiency

By having convenient access to large amounts of actionable data from multiple sources, teams can operate more effectively. The more quality data that teams can operate with, the better the insights and the better the results. The right data will provide the fuel that projects and initiatives need to get off the ground.

Maximize the value of your data

Through data collaboration, data can be utilized more than once between multiple parties, both internally and externally. Appending your first-party data with quality external data enriches your data to be more well-rounded, trustworthy, and useful.

Not only can you access valuable data sources through data collaboration, you can also cash in on the value of your own data assets. By selling your own first-party data to organizations that are actively seeking it, your company can begin generating an entirely new source of revenue.

Barriers to effective data collaboration

Data collaboration is the best way to supercharge your organization's growth and strategy, but there are some roadblocks that have kept organizations from taking the first steps.

Complex and diverse data formats and systems

Valuable data is stored by many different entities in many different formats. However, it can be hard to find, access, and integrate external data so many organizations simply go without. This leads to incomplete or inaccurate insights, missed opportunities for competitive differentiation, and difficulty in making data-driven decisions.

Time-intensive, manual processes

Data collaboration can be a slow, costly process that consumes valuable time and expertise, diverting attention from other projects. Due to limited resources and a lack of technical expertise, many organizations can’t handle data collaboration at scale.

Data privacy and regulatory requirements

Controlling ownership and accessibility when collaborating with data can be confusing and nerve-racking. Organizations face security risks and compliance issues, leading to potential legal and financial penalties. If organizations don’t understand certain regulations or make a mistake, they could end up paying for it.

Data collaboration platforms make collaborating with data easy

Luckily, data collaboration doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds. By leveraging a data collaboration platform, you can automate the most complicated and time-intensive parts of both data acquisition and data distribution in a safe and secure manner.

Narrative enables seamless data collaboration and eliminates the complexities of accessing and distributing data. Narrative’s data collaboration platform is an all-in-one solution that streamlines and simplifies data acquisition, monetization, and sharing, with powerful automations and easy-to-use, no-code workflows. With Narrative, you can find, access, and combine data from any source, in any format, with just a few clicks.

See how Narrative can help you collaborate with data today. Set up a meeting with our experts to get started.