Ahead of the curve: The new standard in inter-organizational data exchange
86% of businesses do not effectively share data with external digital ecosystem partners. LTO Network is here to fix that.
During the last two decades, multinationals and governments have invested billions of dollars in automation solutions such as ERP, BPMN and CRM-systems to run their day-to-day processes as efficient as possible. Despite these investments, one problem often remains: data is locked in legacy systems and databases. Organizations struggle with exchanging data between systems internally, but even more so when data has to be exchanged with ecosystem partners.
According to a recent Harvard Business Review survey, 43% of respondents claim they can share insights and data within their executive or management ranks. These numbers drop when it comes to sharing data throughout the larger organization, small teams and business units. However, organizations score lowest in inter-organizational data-exchange, as only 14% of the respondents claim that they effectively share data with external digital ecosystem partners.
At LTO Network, this is music to our ears. Because when only 14% of organizations is effectively exchanging data with external ecosystem partners, a staggering 86% is significantly lacking efficiency in this regard.
When Googling the ‘Silo-effect’, one will notice that the articles, blogs and reports mentioning the silo-effect are almost always focussed on streamlining data exchange between organizational silos within an organization through centralized systems. Secure, controlled and efficient sharing of data between different organizations is often not even discussed as a possibility, due to the current lack of scalable technology that would enable this exchange. For data sharing between organizations to be straightforward, there needs to a common understanding of basic policy and practice.
This is where LTO Network comes in. Organizations often work together in structured processes, which can be automated as workflows. The data that is part of and originates from these workflows is valuable for all parties. When these workflows are ran on LTO Network, data sharing becomes an inherent part of the process. Note that the system does not require parties to share all their data, as participants can always specify which data should remain private. Should data from legacy systems be used in the process (or simply transferred to other parties), LTO Network is able to connect to all databases supporting basic access points.
According to the HBR survey, the primary technological barriers towards the data-driven enterprise are the presence of legacy systems and infrastructure (1), followed by the lack of a centralized platform (2), data silos (3) and data consistency issues (4).
To facilitate a more mature data-driven enterprise with regards to inter-organisational data sharing, LTO Network enables collaboration between multiple organizations and departments via decentralized workflows. Parties can keep using their own (legacy) systems, to participate in a process. We will assess the aforementioned technological sub-barriers in the image below.
LTO Network is able to work around these barriers in the following ways:
(1) Legacy systems that use standards for data exchange like XML and JSON, and standards for web services like SOAP and REST can connect to a B2B-process on the LTO event chain.
(2) Inter-organizational processes are run in a decentralized way, meaning that there’s no need for a centralized system to collaborate on. In a centralized system, there would be one system owner (and hence, no level playing field). Other parties would need to switch or to others and parties lack control of their data. Not so with the decentralized workflows of LTO Network.
(3) Data can be extracted from and imported to other silo’s, due to LTO Network’s ability to exchange data and information over the miniature private blockchain, in a GDPR & data-privacy compliant way.
(4) To adapt the unstructured data for usage by all participants individually, a JMESPATH library can be set up, which allows parties to declaratively specify how to extract elements from and into their different systems.
By combining other technologies, such as AI, IoT and robotica, even further gains could be achieved. LTO Network would effectively remove the need for data re-entry on inter-organizational processes. And this is only part of the efficiency gains that LTO Network enables (click here for more!). As a cherry-on-top, the hybrid (private-public) nature of the LTO Network ensures GDPR and data privacy compliance by design.
The efficient and secure data exchange that LTO Network enables, shows that we are ready to take on the 86% of businesses that could improve on their inter-organizational data sharing. Today.
Considering the fact that almost all organizations strive to be data-driven in the near future, one can only conclude that the market for inter-organizational data exchange will thrive these coming years. To assess whether LTO Network’s hybrid blockchain would be suitable for consolidating and streamlining data on your inter-organizational processes, the following decision-model can be used:
To learn more about the possibilities of LTO Network, get in touch with us at support@lto.network.
This marks day 7 of 12 already! The news storm will continue up until January 14, which is the day of our crowd sale. Next up are funding models, business adoption strategies, user acquisition, token design and more. Follow us on Twitter & Telegram for more updates!
