Sharing of information amongst enterprises, aka interenterprise data sharing – is becoming the elephant in the room in the midst of the digital transformation era. This strategy is a cost-effective method to establish data quality for the ever-increasing amount of data each enterprise has to handle when bringing in new digital services offerings. 

McKinsey Digital recently went into some depth on this issue with the article ‘Harnessing the power of external data’. As specified in that piece: “Organizations that stay abreast of the expanding external-data ecosystem and successfully integrate a broad spectrum of external data into their operations can outpace other organizations by making way for improvements in growth, productivity, and risk management.” 

The debate with regards to interenterprise data sharing often balance two factors: privacy and confidentiality. In this blog, we will observe this sensitive issue with the two most typical master data domains: Party data and product data. 

Party Data 

The organization CDQ discussing the case to share party data in their post entitled ‘Data Sharing: A Brief History of a Crazy Idea’. In it, they quip, that the pain can be larger than the concern. 

Privacy via the enforced data privacy and data protection regulations such as GDPR must be complied with and this establishes a very stringent threshold for sharing Personal Identifiable Information only leaving space for the authentic cases of information portability. 

However, data with regards to enterprises can be shared not just in the interest of exploiting public 3rd party sources such as business directories, but additionally as data pools amongst similar-thinking organizations. One must contemplate whether the typographical errors in organizational names, addresses, and more are actually all that confidential. 

Product Data 

The case for sharing product data has been spoken about in some length by experts. Although the massive amounts of product data are intended to become public the worries with regards to confidentiality are concurrent with product data. Trading rates are an obvious sphere for concern. The schedules and times of product data releases is another one. 

Certain enterprises instate rigorous measures to establish an adequate degree of confidentiality. This consist of encryption, and monitoring with whom you are sharing what, and when and why this is happening. 

Data governance has a key role in the arrangement of interenterprise data sharing with the correct approach to information privacy and confidentiality.  

When data is shared across organizations, you will be required to extend your data governance frameworks to deal with the challenges in that regard.