I've been writing a new report on marketing structures and resourcing and in the research process came across the concept of 'Data-as-a-Service' (DaaS) via Ashley Friedlein's annual trends post which I think is a useful way of thinking about how to set up data services to underpin a business. The idea of DaaS is that it can deliver to the varied needs of functions and stakeholders across a business simultaneously, perhaps through the creation of modular systems. In Econsultancy’s Digital Transformation and the Role of Data report author Laura Chaibi describes it thus:
“Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a data framework that essentially splits data access and usage from where the data is stored, freeing the data for multiple uses with speed and ease of access and the ability to scale usage. DaaS data agility is a substructure of digital transformation acting as a reinforcement to solutions enabled through digital transformation. DaaS data can permeate all corners of businesses and how they run with the aim to amplify capabilities and sustainably scale.”
The concept reminded me of Jeff Bezos' famous 2002 mandate about every team in Amazon needing to expose their data and functionality via service interfaces. These interfaces created critical ways in which teams communicated and accessed other capabilities but more than this it created a service-oriented architecture to successive capabilities in the business, effectively establishing separated parts of the company as individual platforms. Opening up these services to external access also opened them up to external competition, helping them to stay efficient and competitive. With data now so critical to organisational capability Data-as-a-Service makes complete sense.
Leave a Reply