Data Should Drive Everything!
Organizations that base their strategic and operational decision-making processes on data perform better than their peers. Data helps avoid missteps, helps improve performance, provides incremental insights, and can even be the basis for new services. Data can even be used to improve the customer experience thereby increasing net revenues. These accepted maxims provide little guidance on how to tap into these benefits in a way so incremental costs do not erase any potential business gains.
First Generation Systems
First-generation data systems were designed around a specific need. Data was collected and fed to an application that was analyzed in order to generate findings that were of value to a targeted set of users with well-defined needs. Each such system becomes a data silo that is managed and operated independently from other data silos. The costs of maintaining a growing number of silos become untenable with little economies of scale. Should these needs evolve, requirements change, or if the desire was to use the data for some other purpose, costs rise dramatically if such system enhancements were even possible.
i3 To The Rescue
i3 was developed to meet these challenges. i3 takes the position that data should be managed as a valuable corporate asset and NOT as an application consumable. The i3 team studied how the financial industry manages the flow of money (and other managed assets) between organizations and adapted their learnings to the emerging data market. Another innovation from the i3 team is based on the concept that data generators are often independent of the data consumers and trusted relationships cannot be dictated but must be allowed to flourish.
How Do You Do That
i3 was designed to manage the exchange of data between those with data and those in need of data. i3 can be easily integrated into existing data flows through the use of API adapters. i3 supports simple API adapters that might be less than three lines long and it also gives users the ability to create adapters that perform complex message transformations. Access to data is managed by an approval protocol that provides the needed level of transparency between data producers and consumers. Control structures are then provided to allow the parties to alter exchange conditions in a way that is acceptable to the exchanging parties. Of course, data exchanges are tracked and managed in a way that allows future disputes to be quickly resolved.
Next Steps
i3 can be used to manage the data flows between departments within a larger organization. It is an ideal solution as a data manager that processes the exchange of data between ecosystem participants that includes subcontractors, suppliers, distributors, and even customer-partners (customers. It can also be used to manage cross-border data flows.
As a software manufacturer, the i3 software can be used by organizations to oversee their own data flows are we encourage our customers to open their i3 nodes to others by selling data exchange services to outside parties as well. We encourage you to peruse the i3 catalog and configure your own i3 system.
Browse the I3 Systems Catalog