Everybody wins with the right approach to data

The provision of open datasets and self-service visualisation tools will produce a win-win situation for both the public and the government.

Over recent years the majority of governments around the world have adopted the open-data philosophy, at least in their public pronouncements. In 2013, the leaders of the G8 signed an Open Data Charter, while the G20 pledged to advance open data as an anti-corruption tool in 2014.

An open-data philosophy can also have considerable financial benefits. Exposing data allows third parties to identify hidden insights and develop solutions where governments cannot justify expending limited resources. A 2013 McKinsey study estimated a potential US$3bn–$5bn benefit to the US alone.

For agencies that have produced data products for public consumption, servicing continuous client requests is a significant overhead. The use of data scientists to produce data extractions and reports puts strain on budgets and results in a less-than-satisfactory result for the citizen-customer due to the delays and cost-recovery bills they encounter.

This is leading more agencies to implement intuitive self-service analytics solutions. These provide a web-driven interface that enables the user to ‘slice and dice’ data in any way they see fit — removing the need to go back to the data scientist for new extractions. When this is married with visualisation capabilities — so that data can be plotted, graphed and displayed geographically — user satisfaction goes up as the administrative overhead goes down.

There are procedural and cultural aspects to be addressed. In areas such as health or social demographics, privacy issues may be a concern. Having been entrusted with citizen data it is incumbent on government agencies to respect that trust — an imperative that is backed by law in most jurisdictions.

And there is often resistance due to concerns that the data could be misused, misinterpreted, used out of context or just plain wrong. It’s important that steps are taken to ensure that accuracy of the published data, but not to the extent that it becomes an impediment to dissemination. The experience of agencies that have published their datasets has been that their online user community has self-policed the intentional or inadvertent misuse of the data. The UK Department for Work and Pensions uses the same web-based toolset for its internal analysts as the general public — thereby ensuring a single source of truth, rapid error correction and a high level of quality control over the output, due to the number of eyeballs that are reviewing it.

Of course the Holy Grail of Open Government Data is the API-enabling of datasets. Facilitating machine-to-machine querying in real time can drive an ecosystem of products and services that present the data in a manner targeted to a specific demographic. For example, in Australia there is a plethora of weather applications that cater to different preferences while using the weather data provided by the Bureau of Meteorology.

Ensuring that society extracts maximum benefit from public data will be a significant driver for data management into the future; self-service visualisation provides a way to deliver without an unmanageable overhead.

Image courtesy Jorge Franganillo under CC