How data product marketplaces enable business team success

To maximize value from their data, organizations must democratize data access, making it easily available and consumable to everyone, without requiring technical skills. . Data needs to be trustworthy, easy to discover and understandable so that employees across the business can confidently use it in their day-to-day decision-making. This requires a culture that promotes data literacy, encourages experimentation and creates strong partnerships between business teams, data teams and IT to continuously improve data use and value.

Ensuring data is securely available and understandable requires two technologies. Firstly, organizations have to embrace the creation of  high-quality, trustworthy data products, to provide business teams with well-governed information they can use with confidence. Secondly, data must be shared through data product marketplaces that offer intuitive, self-service access to data products and assets across the organization. 

In this article we look at the role of business teams in maximizing data consumption and value, and examine how the data product marketplace underpins their success.

Business users are looking to successfully harness data to meet organizational objectives around performance, efficiency, decision-making and the introduction of AI.

There are three key sets of roles within the business team: business leaders, business sponsors and business analysts, and employees (operational users), all of whom benefit from data product marketplaces.

Data product marketplaces provide the business with intuitive, self-service access to all of an organization’s data products and data assets. Integrating with the wider data stack, they enable seamless, secure sharing of data to all (humans and AI) through an e-commerce marketplace-style experience that provides AI-driven search and discovery and collaboration. Usage of data products can be controlled through granular access management and tracked via data lineage and conversion funnel analytics to drive improvements and maximize consumption. 

Business leaders, such as department heads and C-level management, are responsible for meeting specific management objectives, such as maximizing performance and delivering efficiency, growth and innovation.  For this role, the data product is a business asset that is consumable and measurable.

Business leaders need to create value through greater usage:

• Cross-functional use cases focused on business transformation
• Revenue generation and cost reduction
• Innovation, differentiation, and competitiveness (AI/generative AI)
• Broader adoption of analytics
• Regulatory compliance and risk management

Data product marketplaces drive six clear benefits for business leaders. They:

1. Scale data usage and analytics through single, intuitive and centralized space
2. Provide a single source of truth, breaking down departmental silos
3. Do not require technical skills for teams to discover, consume and benefit from data
4. Reduce decision-making time, improve effectiveness and enable automation through AI
5. Enable data monetization and create new revenue streams
6. Increase efficiency through digitalization and process automation

Business sponsors and business analysts are responsible for solving a specific operational requirement through data.  They own the business vision of the data product.

Their primary objective is to increase performance by connecting employees to relevant data in a highly-understandable, consumable format without requiring technical skills.

Data product marketplaces deliver five key benefits to business sponsors and business analysts. They:

1. Provide a clear overview of data product usage and lineage
2. Enable collaboration with data product owners and operational users
3. Lower dependency on data teams through autonomous access to data
4. Increase the speed of use case delivery (BI, AI, reporting, operations)
5. Demonstrate business value through usage KPIs

The operational users of data product marketplaces, employees are responsible for working more efficiently and effectively day-to-day through better access to data. Their main objective is to make their jobs easier and more effective by seamlessly consuming data products within their working lives and processes.

Data product marketplaces deliver four key benefits for employees.  They:

1. Provide trusted, secure access to understandable, usable data products
2. Offer self-service interface and APIs to drive data consumption
3. Enable users to collaborate/provide feedback and questions data product owners, driving improvements
4. Improve productivity, efficiency and innovation

As consumers of data, all three roles in business teams benefit from these core data product marketplace features:

• Seamless access to reliable, trustworthy, and ready-to-use data for faster decision-making
• AI-driven discovery and search to connect users with the most relevant data products
• Collaborative business workflows to facilitate sharing of use cases, data, and feedback across teamsSelf-service data exploration to combine, analyze, and export data
• Easy access requests for data products with restricted permissions
• Intuitive and engaging interface providing an e-commerce-like experience with product pages, bookmarking, and recommendations for related data assets.

Data products act as a shared language that brings business, data and IT teams together.  Data product marketplaces act as a strategic enabler, giving business users an intuitive way to discover, access and use trusted, well-governed data. By incorporating data products into everyday business processes, business teams are empowered to be more innovative, collaborative and make better decisions, driving value for the organization.

Want to learn more about the different business, data and IT roles involved in successful data programs? Download the ebook to get the full picture.