Today’s enterprises generate massive amounts of data internally and through customers, stakeholders, and business partners. Unfortunately, the majority of organizations are still stuck in the past when it comes to sharing that data effectively.
A new pulse survey by the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBR-AS), An Inflection Point for the Data-Driven Enterprise, reveals the lack of data sharing maturity within organizations today.
Only 29 percent of respondents said their organization is very effective at sharing data and intelligence within functional groups or business units, and only a quarter report sharing data effectively within small employee teams. This deficiency translates into a lack of collaboration, loss of shared knowledge, and the inability to derive the deepest insights about your customers, your organization and your industry.
At the executive level, 43 percent of respondents say data sharing works well; however, that still leaves out more than half of the organizations surveyed. For the remaining 57 percent, data sharing is not efficient.
Enterprises face their biggest challenge, however, when it comes to sharing data with key stakeholders outside the enterprise. Only 15 percent of respondents report data sharing effectiveness with trusted vendors and suppliers, and 14 percent with digital ecosystem partners, including vendors and suppliers.
In this age of automation, where data is the currency of smart businesses, how can organizations address these challenges and the embrace the future of data sharing?
Today’s Model
The answer is simple: Enterprises must remove data silos that exist within the organization. If you use a traditional data warehouse or rely on data marts, then loading, copying, and moving data is a manual effort that points directly to expensive inefficiencies and a lack of real-time data sharing.
To be truly data-driven, organizations must centralize all their data and automate data processes. Only a cloud-built data warehouse delivers on this objective. With its modern architecture, this solution stores all data in one place to provide easy data distribution and consumption.
With a cloud data warehouse, sharing data is no longer about moving data but rather about accessing data. This new reality is enabled through “virtual data marts.” Data remains in its original location, and users simply reference it in a secure and scalable manner. Questions about whether data is recent or accurate become irrelevant, and employees, teams and organizations no longer share data through inefficient means such as data copies, packaged data sets and transmitting data.
At Snowflake, we call this solution the Data Sharehouse. Enterprises always maintain a single version of truth, and every employee has access to the same live data. Best of all, to monetize information, data can be shared securely with key stakeholders and partners outside the organization.
Life in a Modern Data Sharing World
Like many large enterprises, Overstock.com spent years dedicating their big data resources to data scientists and their on-premises data warehouse to analysts. Unfortunately, no one was happy with the speed of these systems, and deploying models into production took hours, days or even weeks. Worst of all, employees were not able to work together because the data and teams were siloed.
All that changed when Overstock.com adopted Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse.
“Snowflake allows every group in the organization to use a single copy of the data and spin up new compute resources as necessary,” Overstock.com Chief Digital Officer, Craig Kelly said. “Since we started using Snowflake, we’re seeing more collaboration between groups because they’re using the same tool.”
Overstock.com benefits from the ease of providing internal data sharing, and the online retailer also shares certain data with trusted partners outside its organization.
“With the Snowflake’s Data Sharehouse, we’re able to make our customer data and customer insights available to third parties, so they can run it in their data science models and combine it with other data sets they might have, and in ways that would have taken significantly more resources to achieve,” Kelly said. “Now, we can just spin up the Sharehouse and allow our partners to go to town with our data.”
Overstock.com is one of many enterprises transforming their business through the Data SharehouseTM by securely sharing and monetizing live, governed data.
The Data Economy of the Future
It’s an exciting time for organizations that are ready to embrace the benefits of true data sharing. The future of data sharing is already here and will accelerate capabilities around advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning in ways simply not possible when data is siloed.
Snowflake believes modern data sharing is the best way to share the same truth. Now is the perfect time to power up your enterprise and ensure you are well-equipped to become part of the Data Economy.