What is a data ecosystem

 A data ecosystem is a collection of infrastructure, analytics, and

applications used to capture and analyze data.
 Data ecosystems provide companies with data that they rely on to
understand their customers and to make better pricing, operations,
and marketing decisions.
 The term ecosystem is used rather than ‘environment’ because,
like real ecosystems, data ecosystems are intended to evolve over
time.

Why create a data ecosystem?

 Data ecosystems are for capturing data to produce useful insights.
 As customers use products–especially digital ones–they leave data trails.
 Companies can create a data ecosystem to capture and analyze data trails so
product teams can determine what their users like, don’t like, and respond
well to.
 Product teams can use insights to tweak features to improve the
product. Ecosystems were originally referred to as information technology
environments.

Here are a few common applications for analytics platforms:

 Increasing user engagement
 Using machine learning to identify hidden relationships in the data
 Sending alerts to notify teams of changes
 Messaging users directly
 Analyzing individual users
 Tracking conversions and marketing funnels
 Increasing user retention
 A/B testing feature changes
 Integrating with other applications in the data ecosystem

How to create a data ecosystem

There are three elements to every data ecosystem:

Infrastructure
  If a data ecosystem is a house, the infrastructure is the foundation. It’s the
hardware and software services that capture, collect, and organize data.
 The infrastructure includes servers for storage, search languages like SQL,
and hosting platforms. Infrastructure can be used to capture and store three
types of data: structured, unstructured, and multi-structured.
 If ecosystems hold a large volume of data, they’ll need additional tools to
make it easier for teams to access it. Teams may use technologies like
Hadoop or Not Only SQL (NoSQL) to segment their data and allow for faster
queries.

Analytics
 Analytics serve as the front door through which teams access their data
ecosystem house.
 Analytics platforms search and summarize the data stored within the
infrastructure and tie pieces of the infrastructure together so all data is
available in one place. 
 While infrastructure systems provide their own basic analytics, these tools are
rarely sufficient. A dedicated analytics platform will always be able to dig
much deeper into the data, offer a far more intuitive interface, and include a
suite of tools purpose-built to help teams make calculations more quickly.

Applications
Applications are the walls and roof to the data ecosystem house–they’re services
and systems that act upon the data and make it usable. For example, a product team
might decide to port its analytics data into its marketing, sales, and operations
platforms. This would allow the marketing team to score leads based on activity, the
sales team to get alerts when ideal prospects engage, and operations teams to
automatically charge customers based on product usage.

Things to consider when creating a data

ecosystem
Data governance
In an age where IT no longer has clear, central data oversight, companies need to
establish clear data governance rules, usually by publishing an internal guideline for
how data can be captured, used, stored, safeguarded, and disposed of. Legislation
like the European Union’s GDPR is forcing many product teams to be more
transparent, but those that want to build trust with their users should get ahead of the
trend. Every organization should publish and adhere to its own data governance
guidelines.
Democratize data science
Most teams can benefit from customer information, but if there’s only one person
who can access the data, that person will become a bottleneck. Many companies
invest in analytics platforms that offer intuitive interfaces and allow anyone
throughout the company to access data. DocuSign, for example, deployed Mixpanel
and handed out licenses to over one hundred users across the company. “We’re
building a data ecosystem now, gradually adding more data that we want people to
have easier access to,” said DocuSign Senior Product Manager Drew Ashlock. With
the increase in data access, DocuSign made changes that resulted in a 15 percent
increase in new customer account creation.