Is Your Organization Ready to Share? A Framework of Beneficial Conditions for Data Sharing

In a constantly evolving digital sphere, surmounting organizational boundaries and sharing data offers the opportunity to realize a multitude of mutual benefits, such as advanced analytics and innovative services. Organizations aspire to share data. However, they struggle to identify and establish beneficial conditions for data sharing, and research still offers little support to exploit the potential of data sharing. We apply an exploratory research approach to develop a framework of beneficial conditions for data sharing. By combining ten expert interviews and a systematic literature review, we aggregate 23 characteristics that constitute beneficial conditions into eight categories and apply and validate the framework in a real-world case. Thus, we contribute to research by providing a fundamental understanding of beneficial conditions for data sharing and a compact target picture. Additionally, we enable practitioners to systematically assess an organization’s current condition to set the course toward exploiting the full potential of data sharing.