In their guest article “Data Spaces are not a sure-fire success” in the Standpunkte section of Tagesspiegel Background, Professor Thomas Hess, member of the bidt Board of Directors and Professor of Business Informatics and Business Administration at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Dr Christoph Egle, Managing Director of bidt, explain how inter-company data exchange can be organised via data spaces.
At first glance, platforms for the collection and centralised storage of data appear to be a good solution. However, they lead to dependencies on platform operators and thus to a loss of sovereignty. Data spaces are an exciting alternative to this:
[Data spaces] organise the exchange of data between two or more companies, but have no control over the data itself, only over the metadata, i.e. the data about the exchange. The data itself remains with the companies providing it.
The idea of data spaces has been discussed for several years and has been accompanied by the promotion of a large number of initiatives. These now face the challenge of stabilising the data spaces after the initial funding, which is accompanied by a number of specific economic challenges.
The authors examine these challenges in the Tagesspiegel background article and suggest possible solutions, such as the development of suitable management concepts, and emphasise the enormous potential of data spaces for individual companies, but also for Germany as a business location as a whole.
To the article (in german)
Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess
Member of bidt's Board of Directors | Director of the Institute for Digital Management and New Media, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
