Blog: Building a data-sharing culture
Data is extremely valuable in business. And sharing data can increase the value of your data exponentially. In fact, “[c]ompanies that succeed at data sharing get more value from analytics initiatives – and chief data officers who facilitate sharing play a more strategic business role,” HBR shares.
For leaders and data champions that want to create and support a data-sharing culture, here’s our advice for how to achieve your analytics goals.
Breaking down departmental data silos
When one department doesn’t want to share their insights with another, a data silo is formed. This issue is not new in the world of business, but in a modern age where the expectation is to have access to relevant, trusted insights at a moment’s notice, this issue can lead to potential business challenges or problems, even revenue losses.
By breaking down these departmental silos, you can establish seamless collaboration on key organizational tasks or projects, and optimize operations.
While typically considered for sharing data externally, a data-sharing agreement is a highly effective way to tackle the problem of departmental silos. With agreements in place, everyone gets additional clarity on goals, processes, and responsibilities. And the additional transparency can do wonders for building up intra-departmental trust.
Tip: Try providing incentives for departments to share data rather than forcing them to do so.
How to champion a data-sharing culture
To facilitate data sharing among departments, and across the business as a whole, consider:
- continually educating all teams about the benefits of data sharing
- steering a positive narrative by focusing on the outcomes
- connecting data sharing initiatives to company goals
- ensuring all data sharing processes are transparent
You may find you run into a few roadblocks nurturing a sharing approach to data rather than a more old-school ownership approach. But by “identifying the emotional impacts and inherent biases that hamper data sharing,” Gartner explains, you can start to change the narrative. Note, this isn’t something that will change overnight!
And if you’re ready to establish or improve your business data-sharing culture, here are four clear steps to get started:
1. Establish a solid data infrastructure – modern teams need modem solutions like cloud infrastructure.
2. Tie data sharing into your data literacy strategy.
3. Set your priorities – think about your goals, and how you can improve your KPIs.
4. Prepare the enterprise with the necessary education and documentation, including revisiting any legal or compliance requirements.
Another factor to consider – once the right people and processes are in place – is sourcing an analytics infrastructure that enables actionable insights.
The role of cloud analytics
Choosing an effective data solution is vital for seamless data sharing. With data all in one place, rather than in siloes, teams can easily collaborate and build better insights together, at pace. Cloud infrastructure, like Snowflake’s Data Cloud, keeps your data in one location. And since users don’t need to move or replicate the data, shared insights are always trustworthy and relevant for immediate decision making and action.
When you provide your data teams with modern, scalable BI tools built for the cloud, like Astrato, your analytics adoption becomes frictionless. For instance, your team can share live insights across your Line of Business operations with Astrato Embeds to keep intelligent insights flowing.
Moreover, you can simplify insight sharing with Astrato’s writeback capabilities. Anyone can easily write, edit and comment on data in real-time, transforming read-only dashboards into two-way data apps, saving time and supporting dynamic data sharing.
Sharing data within your organization benefits individuals, teams, and the enterprise. Not to mention the external stakeholders you collaborate with regularly.
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