This content was created by the Data Sharing Coalition, one of the founding partners of the CoE-DSC.
Facilitating better collaborations between IT service providers to jointly meet customer demand. This is the mission of our participant PLTFRM, a company that provides the platform to make this happen. What IT challenges does PLTFRM want to solve with its platform? What is needed to make collaboration in ecosystems easier for IT providers? And to what extent do data sharing agreements help accelerate this collaboration? Rolf van Anholt, co-founder of PLTFRM, will discuss this in more detail during our next Community Meeting on January 27th. We spoke with him in advance.
Stimulating cooperation in ecosystems
PLTFRM believes it is inevitable that organisations must embrace working in ecosystems. However, organisations need support in building and managing these ecosystems. Finding the right organisations and ensuring collaboration is the key to success. PLTFRM wants to stimulate providers to work in ecosystems by means of their platform. The company builds and manages ecosystems for cloud, workspace, outsourcing, application development, go-to-market and data solutions. Rolf elaborates on why this is needed: “Due to fast changing IT landscape and great diversity of technological possibilities, IT service providers, for example, are forced to adapt and see their role changing from generalist to specialist. Consequently, an average organisation has to deal with more and more service providers. Instead of helping their customers individually, we believe that IT service providers should collaborate to better serve the customer.” PLTFRM offers a marketplace where organisations can select and combine proven solutions from specialised IT service providers. Rolf: “Instead of drawing up contracts with all those service providers individually, it is possible to draw up one framework contract, in which all general terms and conditions of all those parties are combined. As an independent advisory party, PLTFRM supervises every ecosystem formed. Our PLTFRM directors provide clear KPIs, monitor the scope of projects, and ensure that what has been agreed upon is actually achieved. All information and communication is transparent and available in a management portal. This way, we relieve both the customer and the various IT service providers.”
By letting others access anonymised, non-traceable data, you might spark an innovation that can help our society, help with valuable research or create new business cases for your own organisation.
Collaboration based on the same standards
Where organisations work together in ecosystems, data is shared. Between customers and their service providers, but also between service providers themselves. According to Rolf, clear agreements on how and under what conditions data may be shared will facilitate collaboration within ecosystems. “How organisations share data sometimes gets in the way of collaboration. Organisations use different standards or they, for example, apply different conditions as to which data can run in a public cloud and which cannot. PLTFRM has joined the Data Sharing Coalition share expertise and learn about the agreements that are needed to better regulate data sharing. I think that, given our experience working with ecosystems and our membership of the Digital Ecosystems Institute, we can add a lot of knowledge about the functioning and challenges of ecosystems. When organisations share data according to the same best-of-breed standards – which could be the generic data sharing agreements that the Data Sharing Coalition recommends – collaboration within an ecosystem becomes easier. In our role as ecosystemen manager, we can advise organisations that use our platform to start sharing data in accordance with these standards.”
According to Rolf, more than sharing data according to the same standards is needed to accelerate cooperation in ecosystems. Organisations also need to change their attitude when it comes to actually sharing data. “Some organisations are too reluctant to make their data available. Of course, you have to protect privacy-sensitive data well, but why not make data that is anonymised and not traceable openly available to organisations, start-ups, or even consumers? This could be data other organisations can directly derive value from. I do not believe that anonymised, non-traceable data should by definition be owned by one party. In fact, not making data publicly available in its rawest form is, in my opinion, a form of abuse of power. By letting others access this kind of data, you might spark an innovation that can help our society as a whole, help with valuable research or create new business cases for your own organisation. Maybe ones you never even thought possible.”
On January 27th, during our next Community Meeting, Rolf will further elaborate on PLTFRM’s activities and vision with regards to data sharing. Do you want to attend this Community Meeting? Please send us an email: info@coe-dsc.nl
