Igniting Your Data Marketplace
At Marcetor, we believe that data challenges cannot be addressed by a single entity or group. Tackling data issues requires a concerted effort of each individual: collaboration. We are not naïve though. Having dedicated tools and set incentives that fairly compensate and recognize the contribution of each community member are a must. Short of a strong governance, stake holders will not participate. A fair and safe place where users, technology, business and management all benefit is needed.
With fair metrics and utility tools to better the user’s life — i.e. increase his impact, one can create a virtuous circle of behaviors with ripple effects through the entire organization. Let’s set rules and play ball.
The players:
That is all nice and cozy, but what does it concretely mean for each stake holder? Who is the user? Who is technology? Who is the business? Who is management?
The user: you, me, us regardless of our level within the organization.
Our mission is to deliver value to our clients (the ultimate boss), our boss, and ourselves! It means delivering goods or services that fulfill our business mission using company resources and our individual expertise and knowledge.
When it comes to data, we often feel frustration: not enough data, too much data, bad quality data, data we do not know how to handle, and which is often wrapped in red tape. We waste time collecting it, preparing it,(re) processing it, or using it. We may miss tools and sometime knowledge.
A data marketplace natively answers the issues of discoverability, definition, quality, quantity and cost. Indeed, data on a data marketplace is there to be bought at a certain price for a certain use. It means that market participants have a clear incentive to make their data accessible. On a marketplace, you can choose which data set to buy based on your level of expertise and needs. As any economic agent you will take the cheapest data available that matches your constraints (time and cost) to exercise your trade.
Technology
Technology, as a group, prides itself, as it should, to be a business enabler. By delivering the right infrastructure, tools, data, and support at the best cost, technology not only supports a business but ensures growth.
When it comes to data the challenges range from:
- fragmented legacy systems,
- some users’ “off system” data sets coming from “their cousin joe or somewhere on the internet”,
- costly hard to source information sets,
- contextless or hyper specialized data sets that are hard to understand unless you are a subject matter expert,
- temptation of brand-new technology solutions & projects,
- being wedded with rigid solutions,
- ….and so on …
The beauty of a data marketplace is that it allows technology to focus on what it does best. By providing a scalable, flexible environment, subject matter experts can self-curate data thus freeing valuable technology resources for strategic solutions. We are not speaking about a self-service system where business users need to guess what technology understood of the data and thus how they stored it. We promote a set of basic utility tools orchestrated and arbitraged by technology to provide the user with full flexibility to curate his or her own data set. One could see it as a git for data seating beside the core infrastructure and serving as an interface between the “physical” data and the business user.
Data marketplaces have demonstrated that they can deliver on time, on budget, usable data. Those simple addons unleash the core system efficiencies. Such thin layers empower the technology team to become a business enabler. First, technology gets closer to the business, and second, the value of the data work done by technology, which is often overlook by the business, comes to light (i.e. cleaning, aggregation, derivation work now have a tangible value). Technology is not a cost center any longer but becomes a fully integrated participant of the value chain.
Business unit
The mission of a business’s unit is to generate profit from sale of goods and services to clients. It means that the purpose of a business unit is to generate revenue and optimize costs.
The business hears that it needs to achieve digitalization and transform their business, or face losing its competitive advantage. The business also sees higher and higher client expectations regarding data. Finally, the business must cope with tighter and tighter resources.
A data marketplace facilitates digitalization, reduces cost, and fosters strong relationships with customers (while being regulatory compliant). It creates collaboration and, most importantly, opens new distribution channels through the discovery of new internal and external partners.
Management
Management makes strategic decisions to insure the profitability of the organization today and tomorrow.
Management faced with data decisions might feel out his depth. Data is certainly seen as a costly line item in money, resources and time. More often than not, data is categorized as that abstract, amorphous risk: a hyped intangible “asset”.
A data marketplace creates a low-level governance which answers most of the questions that management would otherwise have to handle. With a data marketplace, regulatory, reputational, business, security and key man risks are tackled at the source by the experts: the “invisible hand of the market” is playing its role. Additionally, technology bandwidth is freed (as part of the curation is done by the business itself) thus creating organic cost reduction.
A not so simple: Win, Win, Win, Win
While it seems that a data marketplace is a silver bullet, why is it that this solution is not more widely used?
Such a solution has already been implemented in multiple industries and is starting to gain momentum as a technology solution. It is not surprising that we see a rapid expansion of the open source communities, the democratization of microservices, and the organization of rich and granular ecosystem (AWS, Google, etc.). Indeed, all start from the same premise that the collaboration between the parts of what was previously a monolithic solution creates more value than a one-piece solution.
However, such solution needs two things:
- A shift of focus
- A trigger
Data tools are necessary, but they are not enough.
Current data platforms focus on the data NOT on the data user. Yes, the data user needs specific tools, but the data user (owner-validator-consumer) also needs to be paid and to be recognized. Most tools are geared towards making algorithms readily accessible, but not towards facilitating the work of the data practitioner. Data work needs a dedicated workflow and incentives, not only analytics.
It is not quantum physics to say that to access a new more stable state (i.e. change for the better) one needs to overcome barriers, inject energy!
The spark that drives change is called cost reduction. It is not economic any longer to create a glorified “E” drive (I mean a data lake) or throw CPU (even on the cloud) at it.
A marketplace addresses most cost issues:
- A transactional model clearly identifies ownership and where the value is created through the data value chain of derivations, enrichments and validations.
- Fair competition creates an optimal allocation of resources: the price is reflective of the value.
- Data sets can be unbundled. Data is bought by “the glass”.
- Risk linked to data is reduced because market participants have incentives to behave or otherwise lose money and reputation.
Conclusion
A data marketplace can have ripple effect through your organization. While nice to have, employee morale, collaboration, new revenues from data and strong organic governance will not have the tangible short-term appeal of cost reduction.
Regardless of the reason why you choose to test a data marketplace, you will need user engagement. At Marcetor, we believe that Gamification is the process that creates user engagement: data liquidity for your marketplace.
How do we do it? Easy, we create a safe and fair place with basic utility tools and workflow that better the user’s day, ensures that the user gets paid for his contribution and that the user gets recognized for his/her measurable expertise.
We call it sustainable commercial collaboration.
