Open data: Data for free or free datas? What’s the impact?

Jan 31, 2014

Sogeti Labs

The European Union has for years been stressing the goal of opening up data as a resource for innovative products and services and as a means of addressing societal challenges and fostering government transparency.

In June 2013, the G8 reinforced that message in order to push the Open Data initiative based on 5 principles:

• Principle 1: Open Data by Default
• Principle 2: Quality and Quantity
• Principle 3: Usable by All
• Principle 4: Releasing Data for Improved Governance
• Principle 5: Releasing Data for Innovation

Working on this topic for clients, I have had the opportunity to share my views on the Open Data Initiative.

As with other “Open Initiatives,” such as open source (developers community) and open innovation (crowd-sourced brainstorming), open data is really a very good concept that allows people to create and generate values for Citizens and Companies. How to engage is key. Let’s analyze the 5 principles identified previously:

Principle	Goal	Issue
Principle 1: Open Data by Default	Simple idea and plenty of questions regarding the impact on business models for organization (even public or semi public) that used data to generate a part of revenue. This part will disappear and the cost to generate data will at least remain.	The challenge is to build a business model based, for example, on Freemium/Premium concept that will enable organizations to make the difference between rough and mass open data and the added value you can bring to the market or the user regarding “analyzed data”.
Principle 2: Quality and Quantity	Huge impact on reputation and brand if not… it’s not simply a new  way to push data and information using common tools or open a RSS dataflow	Putting in place processes, roadmaps and platforms to support this point is fundamental to reach this principle. Data driven Architecture becomes the only way to minimize the issue.
Principle 3: Usable by All	Nothing to say on that except regarding traceability	The point is to be sure that the use of the data will not hold the organization liable; licences exist to protect against wrongful utilization
Principle 4: Releasing Data for Improved Governance	Tricky even if the goal is transparency. A real courage to accept the fact that the use of the released data will challenge the way you manage the organization and could reveal you were unable to produce the same kind of services or products	The good news is that you provide people with true information and so you can avoid rumors and wrong information based on “unsourced data”
Principle 5: Releasing Data for Innovation	Certainly a good way to allow a new angle on the data you manage currently and create opportunity for people and companies to combine the information released from different organizations, central and local governments, and other private companies in order to generate new services and products.	The issue is to be able to analyze the return on investment for the organization and the whole society. No answer at this stage to provide you with…

The open data movement is a wave to deal with. It is not wishful thinking or a new game. It is a new angle to take into account that reinforces the fact that whatever kind of organization (public or private) you belong to, the new Information System Architecture will have to be designed and built using a Data Driven Method.

Sources and Useful Links :

• http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/
• http://creativecommons.org/
• http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
• http://www.modernisation.gouv.fr/laction-publique-se-transforme/en-ouvrant-les-donnees-publiques/remise-du-rapport-trojette-sur-louverture-des-donnees-publiques
•  http://theodi.org/
• http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/46.449/2.210

About the author

Sogeti Labs

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

Comments