Data sharing opportunities outweigh challenges

BANGALORE, INDIA: The explosion of business processes beyond the four walls of an enterprise has made data sharing top-of-mind for “the business” and IT. Here’s how to turn data sharing into a competitive advantage.

Today, there are unprecedented opportunities to share data across traditional enterprise boundaries, whether to drive innovative ways of doing business or to bring new efficiencies to established processes and channels.

Also Read: IBM builds biggest data drive ever

Challenges to sharing data with business partners and customers are difficult, yet they are diminishing rapidly with new-generation B2B data exchange architectures.

Data sharing applies to everyone

Data sharing matters to every organization in the face of three drivers: growth of business process outsourcing, need to attract and retain your best partners, and the focus on public security and economic risk.

Outsourcing increases the demand to share information across the corporate firewall, raising security and infrastructure challenges. Attracting and retaining effective partners and enabling two-way flow of information is of paramount concern as businesses emerge from the downturn.

Security threats and economic risks have resulted in increased regulation for electronic information sharing.

Few organizations are insulated from all three drivers, and the demands and difficulties they engender.

Connect with all partners for all purposes

From supply chain managers to marketers, business stakeholders need to share strategic information, from product development and marketing information to quotes and shipment status. And they need to be able to scale data-sharing to support thousands of partners. IT needs to address these requirements while supporting new data format and security demands.

At the heart of data-sharing is the complexity of data entering and leaving the enterprise, and the different ways people want to see data. Organizations are looking to:

Pull complex data from many sources within the enterprise, and make it consumable by any partner or customer.

Accept complex data from outside the enterprise in diverse formats, and make it consumable by any internal system and business user.

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Data sharing “must have’s”

You can accomplish this sleight-of-hand with a holistic approach to data sharing that encompasses:

1. Universal transformation— Data sharing has to support a variety of formats and protocols. You need the ability to automatically transform any document type or format into any other format, with an out-of-the-box solution.

This includes unstructured data such as Excel, Word and PDF files, and industry standard data such as HL7, SWIFT, HIPAA and ACORD messages.

2. Automation — Hand-coded routines for parsing incoming data results in a lot of development work and delays in on-boarding partners/customers. It can take months to code and test a parser to extract data from a partner’s files.

You want a solution that will automatically generate transformation, validation rules and acknowledgements.

3. Dynamic trading partner management and simplified creation of partner-specific data flows —Essentially, you want to easily configure individual partner profiles, and effortlessly define custom properties to be executed within a partner-specific workflow.

This enables you to support different needs for information across different partners, ensuring each partner’s individual preferences are met. This is simplified by the use of graphical presentations of data flows, with drop down menus to guide you through complex flows.

4. Data event monitoring — Event logging, monitoring and auditing should be built into the data sharing environment, in support of compliance and SLAs. 

5. Security — Comprehensive authorization measures are mandatory, as is support for encryption/decryption standards. You want support for multiple protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, ebXML, FTP, FTPS and more. 

6. Additional support for rapid on-boarding — Rapid partner on-boarding goes beyond the optimization of data sharing processes. There are other tasks that need to happen in parallel or in sequence to the on-boarding process, and thus the data sharing architecture should have provisions for integrated on-boarding checklists, visibility into where a partner sits in the overall on-boarding process, and integration with other systems.

Today’s business environment calls for a comprehensive management and monitoring architecture that empowers organizations to securely share data with partners and customers. The traditional hand-coding approach is insufficient given today’s realities of increased business process outsourcing, growing importance of partners, and escalating compliance demands.

Forward-looking companies are successfully implementing new-generation B2B data exchange solutions for a holistic and automated approach to data sharing that is helping to advance their business objectives, slash costs, create competitive advantage and drive new revenues.

The author is executive vice president, Data Integration Product Division, at Informatica.

The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of CIOL).