ABSTRACT: Chief Data Officers are expanding data sharing to drive productivity, innovation, and better decisions. Data marketplaces simplify access by connecting users to ready-to-use, high-value data through a centralized, self-service platform.

Read time: 5 mins.

Organizations understand the benefits of scaling data sharing in terms of improved efficiency, better decision-making, greater collaboration and increased innovation. That means that maximizing data sharing and the consumption of data by all employees – not just technical experts – is a key objective for Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and other data leaders.

However, in a complex and expanding data landscape, being able to understand and share information is difficult. Data often remains stuck in silos or is only accessible through technical tools, such as data catalogs, which are restricted to data experts. Equally, even if employees could access this raw data, much of it is difficult to immediately understand and use, lacking context and meaning - essentially, it is not consumption ready.

Understanding the data product marketplace

What is needed is a centralized way of sharing data with the business in ways and formats that everyone can access and understand, building trust and driving consumption. Achieving this requires two interlinked concepts – data products and a data product marketplace.

A data product is a high-value data asset that has been created to meet a specific business need for a large number of users, and is governed through a data contract. It is ready to consume and doesn’t require technical skills to access and use it.  

However, simply creating data products does not guarantee their consumption. They need to be easily discoverable, accessible, and usable – employees have to know that they exist and where they can find them. 

This is where a data product marketplace is vital. Just like an e-commerce marketplace, it brings together sellers (data product owners) and buyers (data consumers), meeting both of their needs and enabling them to interact seamlessly. It provides a showcase for all of an organization’s data products and other data assets in a single, centralized and collaborative space. 

The data product marketplace is designed to maximize data consumption. For example, it promotes data products through an intuitive, self-service interface that enables them to be easily found and confidently consumed by users. Products can be ranked by popularity, ratings, and relevance, building trust and driving usage, while producers are able to understand who is using their data, and for what. It is scalable, to cope with increasing data volumes and user needs, secure to ensure compliance and good governance, user-centric to encourage adoption, and has the ability to incorporate AI-driven innovation to maximize usage and efficiency.

A data product marketplace benefits data consumers, data product owners, and data governance teams:

• Data consumers can seamlessly find and access the information they need through an intuitive, self-service experience

• Data producers are able to easily publish data products and other data assets, engage with users, and act on their feedback to drive improvements

• Data governance teams can monitor data usage, ensure security and compliance, and pinpoint user needs for new data products

Built on an intuitive user experience, customized to company look and feel, the data marketplace is independent of the underlying systems used to create and manage data or where it is located. Essentially, it adds a level of commercialization to a company’s data catalog, moving from providing a technical data inventory to making data understandable, shareable, and consumable at scale.

The benefits of the data product marketplace

All of this means that organizations can democratize access to their data, maximize its use and therefore increase and scale the value that it delivers to the business.

A data product marketplace can be internal (shared just with employees), ecosystem (sharing data with and between partners), or public (sharing data with all audiences). Whichever type of data product marketplace is adopted, it delivers clear benefits to all stakeholders:

Greater productivity

With immediate, self-service access to the ready-to-consume data they need, users are able to work more productively, taking better-informed decisions and avoiding wasting time searching for information. Data team productivity also improves – rather than continually responding to requests for information from business users, they can focus on higher-value activities that maximize the use of their time.

Increased innovation

Making data available through data products spurs innovation within the organization and beyond. Data products can power new ways of working internally, while enabling emerging opportunities to be targeted faster, increasing agility. They can also be the engine for new data services that can be offered externally to customers and partners, creating new revenue streams that boost the bottom line.

Budget optimization

Organizations have invested heavily in their technology and data stacks. However, often this technical infrastructure doesn’t have an end product that justifies the investment, with data still not available to be consumed at scale. Data products delivered via a marketplace maximize data use, underpinning concrete reuses and providing a measurable business benefit and ROI.

Improved transparency

Many organizations, in both the public and private sectors, have a regulatory requirement to share data with the public. For example, public bodies, such as cities or municipalities,  have to demonstrate their performance against KPIs and show how they are delivering value for their budgets. A public data product marketplace provides a single space to share data in easily consumable ways, not only ensuring compliance but improving engagement with all stakeholders.

The rise of the data product marketplace

Chief Data Officers are under pressure to scale data consumption across their organization, yet traditional technical tools don’t enable this. The combination of ready-to-consume, high-value data products, and intuitive, self-service data product marketplaces therefore provide the only viable approach to delivering data consumption at scale. They free data from silos caused by expert tools, build confidence and trust in data and ensure strong governance and compliance. This generates faster, more measurable ROI, greater productivity, increased efficiency, and better-informed, data-driven decision making, helping businesses to thrive in increasingly complex and competitive markets.

About Opendatasoft

Opendatasoft is the leader in data democratization. Its data product marketplace solution enables organizations to create business value by providing centralized, secure, self-service access to data assets and products for all business teams or external stakeholders.

Thanks to Opendatasoft, companies accelerate value creation and business impact by deploying internal, ecosystem and public marketplaces at scale in record time.

Opendatasoft supports more than 350 customers in 25 countries and powers more than 3,000 data marketplaces. Based on this experience, it has developed unique data management expertise, enabling it to provide clients with premium services and supporting tailor-made use cases that deliver high added value.