If we look across the gamut of IT solutions for the enterprise--from, payroll systems to the most advanced enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and business intelligence platforms–-there is no doubt about the ownership of the data that flows through the applications.Some internal algorithms might be proprietary, but it is the customer who provides the input data and reaps the benefits from the resulting analyses and actions, all the while retaining the ownership of the incoming and outgoing data.

Moreover, vendors pride themselves on the ease of integration of their solutions and the flexibility of the import/export capabilities they provide. Yet, there is a realm in the enterprise that feels from a bygone era: the call recording platform in the contact center, where many vendors still cling to antediluvian practices of storing the recorded calls and associated metadata in closed databases with cumbersome and slow interfaces, making it overly difficult, if not outright impossible, for customers to access their own data.

There is a general movement towards the liberation (and atomization) of data, a trend that, of course, emanates from the digital revolution and the fact that a large and growing proportion of all the information generated and consumed by humans-–from written, aural, or pictorial artifacts to all kinds of communications and transactions–-is digital (or digitized) and thus easily copied, stored, and sent across computer networks.

Incidentally, the atomization of information (e.g., micro-updates on social networks or the goal to “find any moment from any film, instantly” from the startup AnyClip) is also a result of the digital age, where information can be easily quantized or segmented into discrete chunks and thus queried and retrieved independently. In fact, a hallmark of the Web 2.0 technologies are the mashups or combination of information from different sources using data mapping techniques that treat disparate Web services or even Web pages as a giant collection of facts to be discovered, syndicated, and monetized. Aiding that effort, pivotal Internet companies such as Google or Yahoo! go out of their way to provide easy-to-use interfaces (APIs) to programmatically access their services.

How silly would it be for a payroll management solution to deny the chief financial officer access to the earning statements? Or for a banking application to refuse showing customers the checks they have deposited? Yet, when it comes to call centers, many operations executives and IT managers find themselves in the absurd position of having to plea with their call logging provider to be allowed access to their own calls and associated metadata.

Fortunately, the march towards data liberation is resolute and unstoppable, and enterprise customers will not tolerate for much longer being treated by call recording vendors the same way that certain photo-sharing sites treat their users: after you upload your pictures, all you get is a thumbnail and the possibility of paying for printouts.

Marsal Gavalda, Ph.D., is vice president of incubation and principal language scientist at Nexidia. Prior to joining Nexidia, he served as director of language technologies at Dictaphone and as senior research scientist at M*Modal. Every summer he directs a course on science and technology at the Universitat Internacional Menéndez Pelayo in Barcelona. He is the author of more than 30 scholarly publications and half a dozen patents and speaks six languages fluently.