Managing open data

By Michael Chuietal

New initiatives by governments as diverse as those of the US, Mexico and Singapore are opening the spigots of readily-usable public data. Corporate information too is becoming more "liquid", moving across the economy as companies begin sharing data with their business partners and, sometimes, consumers.

Also surging is the richness of the information from data aggregators, which are assembling, rendering anonymous, and selling (to interested third parties) a wide range of data flows. These new sources of open data represent an expanding trove of largely unexploited value. One everyday illustration of open data at work is a smartphone app that uses real-time data (provided by transit authorities) to tell commuters when the next bus or train will arrive.

Using open or pooled data from many sources - often combined with proprietary big data - can help companies develop insights they could not have uncovered with internal data alone. Demographic data, financial transactions, healthcare benchmarks and real-time location data are among the myriad new information sources a company can exploit to create novel products and services and to make its operations more effective and efficient.

New research suggests that $3 trillion or more in annual value could arise from the use of open data in applications across seven domains of the global economy.

From "What Executives Should Know About Open Data"