I’ve been thinking a lot about summits these days. Last week, my husband returned from a successful Himalayan expedition, during which he summited Ama Dablam, an icy 6,812-meter (22,349 feet) spire rising above the Khumbu Valley. While he was facing the elements at inhuman elevations, I was preparing for my own expedition to Snowflake Summit.
Although completely different endeavors, both of our summits revolve around collaboration. He relied on his climbing partner and the hospitality of locals.
At Snowflake Summit, we will demonstrate how to collaborate with data. The Snowflake event, themed The World of Data Collaboration, will have a strong focus on the evolution of data sharing and opportunities for building new data services and applications.
In fact, the event is timely. Snowflake recently commissioned a survey of 1,000 business and technology executives across five industries and eight countries, and published How to Win in Today’s Data Economy. The survey set out to explore how companies were approaching opportunities to share data, and the challenges they faced in fully exploiting their data assets. For many, the journey is almost as arduous as a peak in the Himalayas.
How to win in today’s data economy?
The obvious answer to the question of how to win might be obvious: Use data to deliver business value. That, in itself, is a challenge for many data leaders who lack the tools and skills to deliver on that promise. But the proverbial bar keeps getting higher—like the false summits you see when hiking that make you think you’re almost to the top, only to discover a higher peak just over the ridge.
Delivering business value internally is just table stakes at this point. Everyone will be doing it. You may survive but you won’t likely thrive. It’s not only about using internal data, and applying it to internal processes. It’s about expanding the scope of data collaboration to partners and customers.
As the CDO of a midsize U.S. bank once told me, “With our own data, we can only look internally. We need to see industry benchmarks, regional trends, what waves we can ride in on.” Companies are on the hunt for data from diverse sources to increase the accuracy of models and the impact of the insights.
Organizations that will succeed in the data economy are those that will embrace data collaboration. These companies are able to share data across business units within their organizations, as well as sharing and accessing data from external sources. They can easily access this data, and use the data to inform most or all of their decisions. These are today’s Data Economy Leaders, and they do fulfill the mandate to deliver business value, not just by using internal data internally but also by collaborating to expand their own data economy.
Three-quarters of Data Economy Leaders report positive annual revenue growth over the past three years, compared with just over a third of the laggards in the survey. They are also more likely to report increases in profit margin and operational agility—critical to success in the current dynamic business environment. However, only 6% of the recent survey respondents were true Leaders with the people, process, and technology needed to support data collaboration.
The vast majority of respondents use data to address business use cases such as forecasting business performance or identifying fraud. However, for most use cases, just about half report that they are expanding the volume and diversity of the data they use.
The exceptional use cases are risk and fraud prevention and personalization of the customer journey. Yet, these still remain just over half.
Most companies have not yet fully expanded their use of more and diverse data.
Come join us in Las Vegas, June 13–16, to learn more about how to succeed in the data economy by better collaborating with data both internally across your organization and externally with partners and customers.