How Different Personas Benefit in the New Data Economy with a Data Marketplace

Getting the right data to the right person at the right time is critical for any data-driven organization. Data sharing provides the enterprise with the ability to accelerate and empower decision making. It can also build trust in your data, driving data consumer adoption throughout the organization.

A data marketplace is the newest innovation in the data economy. It brings diverse datasets into a single place and acts as a storefront for self-service data access. This allows data consumers to find and access the data they need without depending on any IT resource. The data marketplace also allows data owners to merchandise their data assets. This makes data assets more discoverable accessible to the data consumer community.

Members of the data consumer community have different goals and priorities. But a data marketplace offers benefits for each persona. A data marketplace lets you provision governed, trusted data and drive data-driven decisions, whether you are a:

• Data engineer
• Data scientist
• Business analyst
• Executive leader

To see the value that a data marketplace brings, let’s look at how some personas would reap the benefits.

Data Consumers: Looking for Simple, Intuitive Access to Trusted Data

These are the business analysts, line of business executives and data scientists who use data for analytics or data science purposes. Their primary concerns are whether the data they are looking for exists or not, and who can grant them access.

At a minimum, these consumers need to know what datasets exist, who owns the data and how they can access it. It’s even better when they can see that they can trust the data and use it in compliance with organizational or regional policies.

As a storefront for the data assets in your organization, a data marketplace allows data consumers to see the data that’s available. This visibility greatly reduces dependency on data engineers. And a seamless data shopping experience makes it easy for data consumers to find, understand, trust and access the critical datasets they need. And when the line of business executive doesn’t see what they need? A business-friendly interface lets the data consumer request the critical data assets that they can’t find.

A data marketplaces merchandises the data by promoting trust and transparency. Users gain insights about who owns the specific data assets, the level of data quality, delivery timelines and much more. It enhances data trust, automates data delivery and reduces the time spent searching for relevant datasets. And all of this helps to accelerate analytics initiatives.

For data scientists, data marketplaces have proven to be an ultimate enabler in democratizing AI models. They can now publish and shop for the relevant and most used AI/ML models. As data marketplaces can also recommend the best data assets to train AI/ML models, they are essential for data science initiatives, too.

Head of Data Engineering: Finding Ways to Work Smarter

The data engineering team used to respond, assess and fulfill all consumer requests for data. This led to data engineers being inundated high volumes of one-off requests. Add the lack of automated data delivery mechanisms and you end up with a resource crunch.

Very often, this meant that data engineers struggled. Although they’re not subject matter experts, they were still expected to convert business requirements/semantics into a technical need. This required an investment of their time and effort:

• Identify the owner
• Get their approval
• Check the other data-compliant policies
• Look for the best way to deliver the data

A cloud-native data marketplace provides data engineers with the ability to track requests over a period of time. Historical trends of data requests and demand helps them to allocate resources more effectively. It also makes it easier to identify redundant or similar requests and align synergies.

The transparency and insight with a data marketplace provides a clear advantage for data engineers:

• Every data collection in the marketplace has an associated owner
• The data owner provides information about any compliance or policy guidelines
• The data owner confirms the supported data delivery methods when they add the data to the marketplace

This reduces data delivery times and makes data engineers more efficient and productive.

Head of Data Management: Enabling Transparency, Access and Insight Across All Lines of Business

Every enterprise has numerous lines of business. Each line of business may have its own siloed data banks, stored in different repositories, with different access controls.

To create data pipelines across the line of business and enable a common data delivery pattern for data consumers, data management leaders have started using data fabric architectures. Unfortunately, the majority of data consumers do not have the data literacy of data engineers or data scientists. And most business analysts are looking for a simplified, intuitive way to find the data they seek.

Metadata provides ample information about data location, data format, data lineage, quality of data or freshness of data, but it lacks data intelligence when it is not connected to the seamless data delivery.

With a data marketplace, corporations can merchandise their data assets to their data consumers. It offers a one-stop shop where consumers can find the details about the available data:

• The context
• The quality
• The procurement method

This empowers and automates data delivery to data consumers and reduces delays and dependencies. And that allows data management leaders to translate data intelligence into data consumption.

Easy to use and scalable, it’s a solution that you can customize to support data assets for any additional line of business. It also delivers better visibility and access, eliminating data silos and promoting data synergies.

Data Governance Leader: Allowing Data Owners and Consumers to Collaborate

Data sharing and collaboration have become priorities for the modern enterprise. And that makes it even more crucial to have a robust governance system. Data marketplaces allow data owners and consumers to collaborate and democratize access to data. This means that governance leaders must ensure they can:

• Govern accessed data
• Enable role-based access control
• Follow organizational and timeline policies for data delivery within and outside the organization

A data marketplace can be the source of many insights about the best ways to optimize and strengthen governance policies. For example, if usage shows that most of the people are using data for analytics, governance leaders can avoid any compliance issues by either managing or masking the personally identifiable information (PII).

Then too, usage insights will reveal how much time it takes to process data requests and identify any source of delays. If it’s taking too long to determine whether the data can be shared, resources can be shifted accordingly. If there is a delay due to a limitation of one of the tools? They can work with the CDO and CDAO to identify any investment necessary to enable a better turnaround.

CDOs and CDAOs: Succeeding When They Can Democratize Data Access and Optimize Data Delivery

Chief data officers and chief data analytics officers focus their efforts on creating a data-driven organization to strengthen their decision-making capability. This calls for a data strategy that promotes data sharing and being able to democratize data access to drive data analytics initiatives, while optimizing data delivery costs.

CDOs need to strategize how they can benefit from past data investments. They also need to make sure that any new investments in tools and technologies can scale to meet future data needs.

And CDOs can gain powerful insights from the usage pattern of a data marketplace. That’s because a data marketplace offers CDOs and CDAOs a detailed view of where their investments are going. It can also provide a short list of the best candidates for optimization. Examples of these insights include:

• Frequently requested datasets can help owners prepare and be ready with data collections
• CDOs can make informed decisions about any investments needed to support a team of data owners
• Location insights about data delivery can identify trends and optimize for future requests
• Evaluate whether additional investment is needed for certain tools or whether any tools should be retired as no one is requesting that data

Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace is part of the Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform. This gives CDOs an opportunity to leverage related IDMC services. These end-to-end services provided through an AI-powered platform will provide peace of mind to CDOs.

Whether you are a data consumer or a data owner, a data marketplace works for you and can help drive efficiency and productivity for any enterprise.

Learn How You Can Get Started With Your Own Data Marketplace

Discover your options and how you can provide a seamless shopping experience for your data community:

• Read Data Sharing Marketplaces for Dummies
• Join us for a live product demo