Beyond Open...

The past few years has seen a proliferation of Open Data initiatives around the world. In Australia, these have been particularly concentrated in comparison with much of the activity abroad. In some respects, our relative progress in Open Data is to be celebrated and encouraged. Has this activity in fact though achieved the lofty aspirations which drove it?

Can we point to specific outcomes as evidence of broad achievement of reasonable benefits in proportion to the extent of time and effort invested? How much contribution has Open Data made to digital transformation across any sector, to innovation as evidenced by the performance for instance of our tech sector or the development of new inventions or solutions to as yet unsolved challenges? 

To be clear, Open Data initiatives have brought some clear benefits. First, these initiatives have brought the potential value of data into focus and helped created an almost universally held belief that data does in fact have value that we should strive to leverage. These initiatives also helped us understand that in principle the value of data and the extent to which it is shared with disparate stakeholders are correlated. At a more granular level these initiatives also created the impetus for taking stock of data assets and investing time in improving data quality. There are some good examples where Open Data has delivered some value and though the intent was good the results have generally been limited. Beyond that, many would agree that Open Data is not going to meet the full spectrum of aspirations we hav for data and should therefore be seen as just one step.

So what do we need to accelerate data-driven decisions across every level of every organisation in every sector? In many respects there is no more pressing issue. Our ability to do this will determine our relative success in coming years as governments and industry, as citizens and communities and as a nation. In short, we need an approach (with supporting digital infrastructure) that enables us to manage what “open” means in any given situation. That means empowering ecosystems of data sharing, innovation and collaboration to scale in all dimensions including:

• Scale of Access - allowing any and all data to be securely and easily accessed subject to relevant privacy regulation and based on the entitlements set by each data owner in any given ecosystem based on a given purpose.
• Scale of Data - facilitating an ecosystem of collaborators to do work with the data they need to fulfil their purpose regardless of the number of data-sets or the size of data-sets required.
• Scale of Ecosystem - allowing any group of collaborators to access and work with nominated data, whether between one or two individuals to many tens of thousands of organisations collaborating together for a common purpose.
• Scale of Sector - enabling data collaboration between users in collaborating organisations regardless of sector.

That's what success looks like. That's how we get to being data-driven organisations, industries and government. That's how we will see exponential gains in economic performance, and in innovation and in social wellbeing. This is how we can solve our biggest challenges. This is where we start building our tomorrow...