Background
Organisations commonly interact with other peer organisations, relying on each other to reciprocate in sharing valuable up-to-date operational information to make critical business decisions.
Understanding the location and status of a peer organisation’s assets, planned and current works can be vital when making operational decisions. Likewise, having clear visibility of external events such as weather patterns and emergency services incidents is crucial to effective planning and day to day operations.
The value of sharing information is clear, however organisations typically struggle to share their data effectively and take full advantage of the data shared with them.
By providing a platform to share data effectively, Elafent enables all parties to get on the same page and work from a single source of truth so each organisation can get a complete and authoritative view of the latest internal and external information.
Operational Challenges
Conventional data sharing practices are clunky at best and typically involve the following challenges -
Preparing and maintaining specific data sets for each peer organisation requires a separate, manual task performed outside of day to day operations
Data files are shared sporadically through email or “dropbox” style applications which can raise security concerns
Organisations need to share data with numerous peer organisations who each have different levels of technical maturity and resources
Organisations are continually evolving to improve business operations and as such, their preferred approach for sharing data also changes over time
Operational data from peer organisations is being stored in isolated information silos
A lot of wasted time is spent chasing up other peer organisations for the latest data and vice-versa.
These challenges can often lead to organisations -
Being unable to effectively participate in data sharing activities due to technical and resource limitations
Being kept out of the loop and not notified when the status of critical peer data changes
Burning cycles trying to find the latest peer data
Viewing peer data in isolation and not in relation to other information sets as part of the bigger operational picture
Making decisions on incomplete, inaccurate, unauthoritative or out of date information.
The impact of these limitations is multiplied by the number of peer groups an organisation needs to work with, potentially leading to -
Work collisions between organisations where competing work schedules impact each other’s operations
Reduced efficiency and increased costs
Increased safety risks to workers and the community
Increased response times and reduced levels of customer service and satisfaction.
Operational Optimisation
Share and collaborate on operational information more effectively while importantly maintaining custodianship, security, currency, veracity and provenance in the shared data, through Elafent’s three-pronged approach -
Elafent Web/Mobile Apps- data shared with an organisation can be viewed directly through the web and mobile apps and in relation to their own internal operational information to form a complete operational picture
Elafent Data API - with greater levels of technical expertise and maturity, data can be taken from and brought into applications and systems programmatically
Elafent Secure File Share - upload and download the latest data shared through a simple to use, web-based application.
The Elafent Cloud Platform (ECP) offers options to see, integrate, put and get information as requirements and capabilities and maturity levels evolve.
Each data custodian manages “what” information and “which parts” of it are shared with other peer organisations in alignment with their data sharing and privacy arrangements.
The diagram below provides a high level example of a typical Elafent peer-2-peer data sharing architecture -
Business Impact
Organisations now have a compelling and seamless way to share operational data with each other so all parties are on the same page working from the single source of truth to deliver the benefits outlined below -
Increased efficiency
Cost savings
Vastly improved data security and work safety
Better quality decision making
Improved coordination and collaboration
Improved customer service and engagement.