It’s Time to End Enterprise Data Silofication

For those of us who work with transformational technology, the exponential pace of innovation in tech has almost become a cliche. What many people ignore, however, is that a similar pace of change is occurring within enterprises themselves. As innovation accelerates, the very models required for enterprises to provide value to their customers and generate revenue have changed as well — and enterprises today will have to make major changes to keep up.

If there’s one thing that is clear, it’s that “business as usual” is no longer an option. Whether or not enterprises embrace or fight these shifts will be the make-it-or-break-it determinant of which businesses succeed in this new era.

The challenges of enterprise silofication

At the heart of the issue is that enterprises have produced a conundrum of silos. Traditionally, for enterprises to make use of major technological advancements, they have been forced to build proprietary systems that kept data locked up inside the company vault.

Enterprises, this line of reasoning goes, derive their value from the places in which they segment themselves off from other entities. This self-imposed hermitage allows them to hoard their precious resources (namely, data) from invaders.

These data assets are seen as the lifeblood of the organization. In the business models that have thrived over the last decade, companies were forced protect an ever-looming mountain of privately collected data or else wither on the vine.

As a result, during the most recent era, sharing datasets between enterprises — or even between departments within the same organization — is not something for which many existing enterprise systems have been designed. Until recently, most businesses have tended toward a hoarding approach, which up until now have generally been “collect as much data as we possibly can and figure out what to do with it someday.”

Fast forward to today. Data has never been more important to the future success of a company. Enterprises need robust datasets to learn about their customers and prospects — often more data than a single enterprise is able to collect themselves. This causes enterprises to become data consumers, reaching out to other enterprises to acquire the data necessary to advance business development.

By the same token, many enterprises are also realizing that the data they do collect is a valuable resource that could be monetized to provide additional revenue for the company. They are looking for options to sell their data to other enterprises in a way that is safe, secure, and protects their customers from harm.

An enterprise solution for data exchange

In order to truly end data silofication, then, enterprise solutions are needed to bridge the gaps that have naturally evolved between organization in the old siloed model. These new solutions must address data normalization in collection, in metadata definition, and in transferability outside of the silo.

Unification supports enterprises to seamlessly exchange datasets across silos, allowing an enterprises to merge data with one another, while also enabling them to act as both data producer and data consumer within a single marketplace.

With Unification, enterprise data is routed through our machine-learning algorithm, where its markers are reformatted to produce a data set than can be instantly correlated with other datasets.

Additionally, each user’s identifiers are mapped to Unification’s Unified Verifiable Credentials Identification (UVCID) system to ensure a cohesive data profile across multiple datasets.

These functions remove the technological barriers that have long prevented enterprises from transmitting their data between interested parties, and allows the possibility to new innovations to be uncovered through merging datasets.

Unlocking a new era for enterprise

As more enterprises adopt these new and improved models for managing data, we can expect to see the beginning of a massive transformation in both functionality and profitability for enterprises.

Unification charted this shift in our article “Why Unified Data is Inevitable: The Relevance to Enterprise.” As we described there:

“Unified data allows enterprises to unlock a series of benefits heretofore inaccessible in the fragmented data system:

• Enterprises are able to easily access and readily incorporate data sets collected by other businesses, finding correlations between diverse databases that were previously difficult to uncover.
• Accessing a better map of data correlations allows businesses to produce more robust functionality within their products, informing their internal algorithms so it can make better predictions.
• A single data standard allows enterprises to seamlessly exchange data amongst themselves, without needing a sales team to buy and sell data, or engineers on hand to reformat purchased data sets. This increases monetization opportunities for enterprises, as well as reduces the development costs of acquiring data.”

For enterprises who are committed to growth, Unification’s data standardization and exchange mechanisms offer the opportunity to stay ahead of new technology, while also providing significant potential to increase their bottom line.

Case study in ending data silos

As part of our mission to end data silofication across the planet, Unification is currently working closely with hand-selected healthcare companies in one particular developing nation.

The major health insurers there have found cases where healthcare providers have charged multiple insurance providers for a single procedure for one individual, resulting in significant losses. As it stands, these health insurers which cannot compare their raw data with each other, meaning duplicate claims go unnoticed.

If these insurers were able to access data across existing silos, they would be able to compare health providers’ time and date of service, procedure code, and unified verifiable credential of any single individual. As a result, these mistakes (or perhaps outright fraud) could be caught in real time.

Unification is working directly with these companies to make unified data across the healthcare space into reality.

Unlock the power of data in your enterprise

If you’d like to know more about how Unification’s product can support your enterprise in its growth, reach out to me here to discuss if your business is a good fit.

Learn more about Unification

If you’re interested in what we’re building at Unification, there are several ways to get learn more.

The best place to start is our Telegram group, where I and other members of the Unification team are present to help answer any questions you may have about the project.

More details can also be found on our website and our Medium publication.

If you’d like to go deep, I highly recommend you dive into our technical paper and white paper (both available on our website).

We’d love to hear your feedback.