How We Got Here
Infrastructure Development
The creation of Data Collaboration Platforms as a category was born out of a decades-long maturation of how companies leverage "big data." In the early 2000s, a number of Silicon Valley companies open-sourced software making it easier to collect, store, and analyze massive data sets. These software packages were initially adopted by large companies to help them manage their own data and quickly moved into mid-sized companies because of easy access through cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Talent Acquisition
These new software platforms ran on a different paradigm than traditional databases and quickly the companies who had adopted them realized they had a talent problem. The infrastructure and the problems the infrastructure allowed them to solve were much different than what the existing employee pool was trained to work on. In turn, the second phase of the maturation was to hire a new class of employees who had a more sophisticated data background. The employees include data scientists, data engineers, and data analysts who were used to working with a toolset more complicated and powerful than Microsoft Excel. With the infrastructure and talent pool in place predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence now seemed less like science fiction and more like technologies that could be leveraged today.
Data Deficiency
As data became a more important strategy within the enterprise and with their infrastructure and talent in place it has become apparent to many companies that their data alone isn't sufficient. If the infrastructure is the car and the data scientists are the driver, companies still need to fill up the car with gas to win the race. This third phase of the cycle comes in the form of companies needing an easy way to acquire the fuel in the form of data. Narrative created the first Data Collaboration Platform in 2016 to solve that problem.