Here's a new angle on the benefits of industry data standards: Cooperative analytics. Writing about the credit union industry, Nate Wentzlaff explains how cooperation is “a defining value of credit unions”, and that sharing best practice across the sector requires sharing data. To that end, there's now a common analytic data model for the industry.
Of course, industry data standards are useful across the systems landscape, not just in common, shared applications designed for otherwise separate organizations. What interests me here is the idea of cooperation being a defining value. Cooperation, or collaboration, is the signature of digital business. It's hard to think of any kind of organization that can live in its own bubble – without connections to customers, partners, regulators, and government agencies.
Cooperation is increasingly an operational matter, as it always has been in insurance. There has to be a value chain for any value to be generated. But cooperative analytics may be a more gentle introduction to effective collaboration for organizations that are unsure about committing to collaborative operations at the present time. Sharing appropriate management information can help industries to improve across the board, so competition between players gets reset to a higher level.
Industries are collaborating more and more in their delivery of products and services. Often, their use of common data standards lags behind individual collaborative applications. But the possibility of cooperative analytics is founded on the use of common data standards. It can't be achieved in any other way. CU Insight
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