Overcoming limited dataset availability when working with industrial organisations

Increasing data security and privacy requirements combined with the need for additional data management research leads to a conflict for industrial companies. In order to solve their industrial data management problems companies need to share some of their data, but their internal confidentiality rules sometimes hamper this sharing process. Existing techniques for sharing data without releasing company secrets often loose some of the problems/characteristics within the data. This paper therefore presents a qualitative process to overcome this problem of industrial data sharing while still enabling external researchers to develop relevant solutions to organizational problems. It is based on initial trials with two industrial case studies and showed some promising results.