CIOReview
| | DECEMBER 20208CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONBy Melanie Nuce, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, GS1 USPULVERIZE DATA SILOES NOW WITH ENHANCED COLLABORATIONToday, massive amounts of data are being collected, but how much of it is being put to good use? Zettabytes of data are piling up while CIOs face pressure from competitors to implement advanced technology. With these technologies maturing so quickly, are industries really preparing their data appropriately and leveraging it strategically? Look, sometimes it's perfectly acceptable to say yes to an exciting new project and then work out the details as you go along--the entire Agile method is built on this iterative development idea. But making the decision to become a truly data-driven organization is a significant step that deserves some careful consideration and preparation before making the leap. Creating an organizational culture that prioritizes collaboration to gain shared value from data is paramount to solving the problems you are trying to address with technology. Using global data standards, such as the GS1 System of Standards, instead of proprietary, closed ecosystems to support data management can unite multiple departments, functions, and external partner systems. Through the use of a common language, companies can enhance data usability and scale technology effectively, as standards provide structure and unique identification that streamline external collaboration and data sharing. Here are three reasons why we need to work together to pulverize traditional data silos and unlock data's potential using standards. INTEROPERABILITY A crucial part of becoming data-driven is increasing the amount of automation--this is precisely the attraction of technologies like AI, where a vast amount of resources would be spent on manual labor in its place. Before a company commits to automation like this, data siloes must become a thing of the past in favor of interoperability. According to a recent survey of senior executives Melanie Nuce
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