As we know, the cloud mod­el dri­ves the adop­tion of ser­vices. That’s one of the rea­sons why ​“XaaS” has become an all-pur­pose term to define ​“any­thing” (that’s the X) as a ser­vice. Just a few exam­ples are soft­ware as a ser­vice, infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice, plat­form as a ser­vice — the list goes on.

In this world pow­ered by web con­nec­tiv­i­ty, exchang­ing infor­ma­tion through flu­id net­works is crit­i­cal to keep­ing our glob­al infor­ma­tion econ­o­my going. This con­cept of ​“inter­op­er­abil­i­ty,” or the abil­i­ty of tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems to exchange infor­ma­tion based on com­mon stan­dards. This is so impor­tant today that gov­ern­ments like the Euro­pean Union are man­dat­ing that tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems remain open. It’s also the ratio­nale behind the for­ma­tion of the Open Data Ini­tia­tive (ODI).

A Push for Infor­ma­tion Exchange

The Open Data Ini­tia­tive, a joint effort between Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, was announced at the Microsoft Ignite con­fer­ence this fall in Orlando.

SAP CEO Bill McDer­mott described the ini­tia­tive as a ​“sem­i­nal moment” for the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try. He sug­gest­ed that now is the time to push hard­er for infor­ma­tion exchange across enter­pris­es and sup­ply chains.

Open Means Prosperous

McDermott’s take on the Open Data Ini­tia­tive appeared in Com­put­er Week­ly as, ​“When you’re open, you’re pros­per­ous. When you think about this open world that we’re talk­ing about, we have to be exten­si­ble with each oth­er — for and with each oth­er — so these plat­forms have to work togeth­er,” McDer­mott said.

There are, under­stand­ably, some caveats and qual­i­fi­ca­tions. There is no cloud with­out infor­ma­tion inter­op­er­abil­i­ty. But at the same time, there is no infor­ma­tion inter­op­er­abil­i­ty with­out the need for pri­va­cy, secu­ri­ty, and governance.

This ​“data lock­down” ele­ment is very much a part of what the Open Data Ini­tia­tive stands for, and it forms the sub­stance of the agreement’s structure. 

Democ­ra­tize and Lib­er­ate Data

We’re talk­ing about democ­ra­tiz­ing data access, but we’re also talk­ing about lib­er­at­ing data from the cor­po­rate enter­prise silos it has set­tled into. 

Why do these silos exist? There are lots of rea­sons, but we could point to three for some context:

• Team struc­tures: Appli­ca­tions and data­bas­es that have been devel­oped by dis­con­nect­ed (some­times glob­al­ly sep­a­rat­ed) teams will often sit in oppo­si­tion to each oth­er, with­out any con­nec­tiv­i­ty. This can come from a com­plete lack of aware­ness. But it can also be pur­pose­ful in envi­ron­ments where teams com­pete against each other. 
• Merg­ers and acqui­si­tions: These messy com­bi­na­tions of dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies often lead to silos where sys­tems were not orig­i­nal­ly engi­neered to exist togeth­er. They can also lead to repet­i­tive sys­tems and sim­i­lar data liv­ing in mul­ti­ple places. 
• Ven­dor lock-in: Some­times his­tor­i­cal strate­gic deci­sions made by one arm of IT or anoth­er depart­ment result in redun­dant or pro­pri­etary sys­tems that are hard to shut down. Typ­i­cal­ly, infor­ma­tion silos will exist here too. 

Why Our Data Holds Us Back

Google open-source strate­gist Edd Wilder-James wrote in the Har­vard Busi­ness Review in 2016, ​“Soft­ware appli­ca­tions are writ­ten at one point in time, for a par­tic­u­lar group in the com­pa­ny. In a world of lim­it­ed resources, appli­ca­tions are opti­mized for their main func­tion. The incen­tives of indi­vid­ual teams are unlike­ly to encour­age data shar­ing as a pri­ma­ry requirement.”

The trou­ble with these data silos is that we need reg­u­lar access to clean, con­sis­tent data if we want to start to take advan­tage of the lat­est technologies. 

As the Open Data Ini­tia­tive aims to democ­ra­tize and lib­er­ate data in con­trolled envi­ron­ments, the hope is that we will reduce these silos and build new bridges of inter­op­er­abil­i­ty for data streams that may exist in dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions in dif­fer­ent formats.

Why Both­er with Open Data?

Most tech­nol­o­gists and busi­ness­peo­ple would prob­a­bly agree that inter­op­er­abil­i­ty in and of itself is of val­ue. But there are deep­er rea­sons that these three major enter­prise soft­ware com­pa­nies are pri­or­i­tiz­ing this initiative. 

As we start to apply web-scale machine learn­ing (ML) and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) func­tions to our tech­nol­o­gy, we risk miss­ing the total intel­li­gence pic­ture if we fail to pro­vide a base lev­el of inter­op­er­abil­i­ty and com­pat­i­bil­i­ty among all streams of live and his­tor­i­cal data. Even basic ana­lyt­ics pro­grams tell us lit­tle if they can’t respond to data that’s hid­den in the cor­ners of our orga­ni­za­tions. This isn’t an offi­cial mis­sion state­ment for the Open Data Ini­tia­tive, but it arguably could be. 

Where machine learn­ing tools are spend­ing a lot of time on data cleans­ing and data dedu­pli­ca­tion now, the hope is that ini­tia­tives like this will help us move ahead on the infor­ma­tion ana­lyt­ics curve. 

A Com­mon Data Mod­el

Moritz Zim­mer­man, SAP’s CTO of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence explained the ratio­nale behind the Open Data Ini­tia­tive to Diginomica’s Derek du Preez at SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Live in Barcelona. 

“The idea is real­ly to cre­ate one com­mon data mod­el, start­ing with the cus­tomer enti­ty. It’s a lot of work in progress. Every­one might have their inter­pre­ta­tion of where to store the data, or what to do with the data, where the data should best sit, but let’s make sure it’s portable,” Zim­mer­man said. 

In terms of plat­form specifics, the Open Data Ini­tia­tive aims to uni­fy SAP C/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA with part­ner tech­nolo­gies includ­ing Microsoft Azure, Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud, and Adobe Expe­ri­ence Platform. 

It’s still ear­ly, but the three found­ing mem­ber CEOs — McDer­mott, Nadel­la, and Narayen — agree there is scope for oth­er firms to join the group (with Sales­force and Ora­cle being the most obvi­ous sus­pects). There are inter­est­ing and more inter­op­er­a­ble times ahead, for sure.

If data gov­er­nance inspires you, hear why it’s a good time to join us for the ASUG Expe­ri­ence for Enter­prise Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment.