In today's data-driven world, collaboration is essential for businesses to stay competitive. However, using traditional methods such as data integration to accomplish a collaborative state in the enterprise often leads to fragmented data and versioning nightmares, which can then become detrimental to an organization's success.
What is collaborative intelligence?
Collaborative intelligence is the process of multiple people and systems working together on the same data in real-time. It requires a change in mindset, moving from a data-driven to an intelligence-driven approach. This means freeing data from the applications used to create and collate it, making it more widely accessible across projects, systems, and people.
Why should IT teams care about collaborative intelligence?
IT teams are tasked with managing the vast amounts of data generated by an organization. Collaborative intelligence can benefit IT teams by eliminating data integration, increasing efficiency, and facilitating real-time data collaboration across the business. By separating data from applications and bringing it together in a unified network of data, organizations can improve data quality and reduce complexity and costs.
How to get started with collaborative intelligence
The key to getting started with collaborative intelligence is to understand that while we collaborate on data, our data foundation is fundamentally application-centric, not data-centric. This means that using hundreds of applications creates hundreds of data silos, increasing fragmentation, complexity, and costs. A Data Collaboration Platform approach can help transform an organization into a controlled, collaborative, and more data-centric one, project by project, unwinding IT and data pipeline complexity.
Are there any drawbacks to adopting collaborative intelligence?
As with any new technology, there are potential drawbacks to adopting collaborative intelligence. Data must be regarded as the ultimate corporate asset and must be protected and accessed only by authorized parties. Deploying the right technology alone is not enough, smart policies effectively enforced are needed to ensure an intuitive construct for the way data is centrally managed, accessed, used, created and updated.
The power of collaborative intelligence
Collaborative intelligence enables people and software to work in unison on real-time operational data to crowdsource new solutions that address real-world challenges. This is far more efficient, collaborative, and inclusive than code-centric approaches, and if supported with the right technologies, data-centricity is able to achieve these goals while respecting meaningful data ownership for all stakeholders.
Collaborative intelligence can be established through the use of APIs in data fabric and data mesh modeled environments, where everyone from business users to data scientists can work alongside each other on operational data to create datasets and data models that are in turn used to accelerate the delivery of new solutions.
