The act of enterprises sharing data in order to generate valuable insights for future decision-making isn’t as complex as it sounds. However, for all parties to remain protected throughout the process, data sharing best practices must be employed. Here’s what you need to know.

Ethics in data sharing

As it’s now an essential business practice, enterprises must consider the ethics in data sharing, and especially the new ethical risks that must be identified and mitigated.

Consider all the resources that are deployed in the process of collecting and managing large swathes of data – financial, technical and of course human resources. Because such a serious investment is made into building up the data economy, there’s an ethical obligation for organizations to share that data in a way that elevates the amount of good that data can achieve.

This obligation is amplified even further when you consider what resources were sacrificed in order to collect and hold the data. There may be ongoing debates about data sharing best practices, but there’s no arguing that, at a base level, there is an ethical need to share pooled data for the greater good.

Data sharing policies

For any organization or global body that wants to embrace the data sharing culture while reducing external risks, they must deploy adequate data sharing policies.

Consider a multinational like Wiley – the global academic publisher is committed to promoting the open research landscape by “facilitating faster and more effective research discovery” through a free flow of shared data.

The company encourages its authors to share their research data (raw data, processed data, algorithms, methods, and more), and outlines its expectations of data sharing, its mandates on data sharing, as well as standard templates for authors to use through its data sharing policies.

Companies displaying data sharing best practices

Data sharing best practices may differ from industry to industry, but we’re seeing a number of the top data sharing companies in the world abiding by a number of similar self-imposed regulations.

In Australia, Data Republic is elevating the data economy by supporting financial institutions, while software company Atlassian is using data sharing to streamline product development.

Elsewhere, ride-sharing operators Uber and Lyft are leveraging the power of data sharing to build out their navigational capacity as well as personalize the customer experience for its riders. Even traditional firms like Fujitsu are embracing the data sharing culture and employing best practices in order to get the most out of the new data economy.

We’re still in the early days of data sharing, which is why it’s so crucial to build proper data sharing best practices to ensure the safety and security of participants, as well as amplify the amount of good that data can achieve.