Dan Stroot

From Open Government to Open Corporation

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8 min read

Let's Talk About Open Government

President Barack Obama, on his first day in office in 2009, signed an executive order stating that all government information that did not have to be kept secret for security or privacy reasons should be made public. The administration also launched the Open Data Initiative to publish government data and the data.gov website to distribute the data.

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

President Barack Obama, January 21, 2009

Huge strides have been made by the "Open Government" movement. Today:

  • Citizens and government leaders alike now expect government data to be accessible, transparent and machine-readable.
  • Further, 67.9 percent of people surveyed believe that “Government data is the property of taxpayers and should be free to all citizens.”
  • By a margin of three to one people said they are more likely to vote for politicians who champion data transparency.

It's progressed far quicker than we expected

  1. The United States Government maintains its Open Data Policy on GitHub! Anyone can fork the policy, edit it, and submit a pull request to have their edits adopted in a fully open process, exactly like creating open source software.
  2. Open data is a global movement. More than 40 countries — from every region of the world and at every stage of development — have established open data initiatives. These nations are opening up all kinds of data sets to promote economic development, spark innovation, and find ways to make government operate better. India has released 3,500 data sets, mostly of agricultural information. Singapore has shared 8,600 data sets from 60 public agencies, and just this year Australian budget data was made available in machine-readable form.
  3. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published a set of standards (ISO 37120) that specifies the relevant metrics for city services and quality of life. This will let researchers and citizens evaluate any city based on a uniform set of metrics. Furthermore, ISO 37120 confirms and accelerates the momentum of the open data movement and now provides a common framework within which all cities can participate. It is a gateway to smarter cities (and citizens).
  4. Cities have embraced the open government movement and opened up their data to the public. Here are some examples:

It has a far larger economic potential than we expected

  • The benefits of open data are self-reinforcing: they increase as individuals access the data and help to improve the accuracy and detail of the information available. As people see the value in the data they will use it to create innovation and growth. It also drives trust as government leaders and officials can now be more easily measured and held accountable.
  • A report by Lateral Economics and the Omidyar Network finds that, by implementing open data policies, G20 countries could increase their cumulative GDP by $13 trillion over the next five years, because open data attracts private infrastructure investment, creates jobs, strengthens tax systems, and fights corruption.
  • A report by McKinsey & Co. suggests that seven sectors alone could generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value as a result of open data, which is already giving rise to hundreds of entrepreneurial businesses and helping established companies to segment markets, define new products and services, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operations.

A Few Words About Open Science

Science can be broadly described as collecting, analyzing, publishing, reanalyzing, critiquing, and reusing data. Interestingly, the open data movement in science predates the Internet. The concept of open access to scientific data was institutionally established in the mid-20th century when the International Council of Scientific Unions (now the International Council for Science) established several World Data Centers to minimize the risk of data loss and to maximize data accessibility, further recommending in 1955 that data be made available in machine-readable form. 1

Much like open government, there are some commonly held beliefs about making scientific data publicly available:

  • "Data belongs to the human race". Typical examples are genomes, data on organisms, medical science, and environmental data.
  • Open data enables open peer review, which in turn creates better science.
  • In scientific research, the rate of discovery is accelerated by better access to data.
  • Sponsors of research do not get full value unless the resulting data is made publicly available. Or, put another way, trust in sponsored research increases.

As a result has been a strong backlash to the current publishing practices and keeping scientific data behind paywalls. To date nearly fifteen thousand scientists have signed a petition for the right of authors to achieve easily accessible distribution of their work.

It's clear that that the concepts of open data benefit science, and the platforms we discuss below could be used to further the goals of open science.

What Open Data Looks Like

Goals, metrics and discoveries must be transparent. Here are examples from city data:

Digital Playbook

Digital Playbook

Digital Playbook

Datasets supporting the goals, metrics and discoveries must be publicly available, along with other supporting data:

Digital Playbook

Platforms have sprung up to support the open government movement. Socrata appears to have market leadership in this space and has a very complete vision of what an open data platform looks like:

Digital Playbook

The "Open Data" Corporation

Open data is fast becoming a defining theme for business.

  • We all know that data is essential for management decision-making and strategic insight.
  • Enlightened organizations understand that data is a strategic corporate asset and foundational to operational excellence.
  • Companies understand that internal clarity and efficiency requires "a single version of the truth", and making data accessible is one of the first steps on this journey.
  • Integrated data from open sources and social media now allows a 360-degree view of customers, suppliers, products and markets and can generate new product ideas.

But how many companies today are committed to open data across the enterprise, or know how to implement an open data initiative? Many organizations still behave as if data is a by-product of the systems that generate and use it, and nothing more. The data stays locked into those systems and is inaccessible to those without a seat license.

Some organizations are "shy" about sharing actual business performance data openly with their employees. This breeds mistrust of course. Some departments may not like openly sharing their data and metrics (what is the average time to resolve a customer complaint?). Some people like to hoard data, giving them power in the organization.

The idea that unlocking value requires open data, and open data deserves deliberate investment, resources, headcount, and technology support – just like a company’s other corporate assets – is starting to sound like common sense.

Why not have an enterprise architecture that is defined by data instead of services?

In the past we have made several runs at enterprise architectures that were defined by services. Best known is "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA) which defined services that performed self-contained units of functionality, such as retrieving a customer record. Services could then be combined and reused to perform business processes.

Some challenges of this approach:

  • It went against the trend towards buying software instead of building it - if I buy SAP what services does it expose? Do I have to build my own services on top of SAP? If so, what happens when I upgrade SAP and the data model changes?
  • Service discovery and reuse are hard problems in large environments, and it is also hard to maintain coherence and integrity of services. Metadata is necessary, like a catalogue, to perform discovery of services.
  • Processes that require managing application or process "state" are difficult to build.
  • Initially there were many technical ways to build services - starting with Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), then Java Business Integration (JBI), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and data distribution service (DDS) and Simple Object Oriented Protocol (SOAP), which led us to concept of "Web Services" and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). In short, a mess.

Why not invert the concept of services and start with data? Instead of starting with the concept of a customer object and then designing services to update the object lets just buy some licenses of Salesforce.com. Now I have all the "services" I need to manage customer data. The challenge is how do I share that data with other applications in the company, or people without Salesforce seat licenses?

Today on the web we generally use the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) design pattern. This means that the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations are specified by using HTTP methods to create APIs. We can consume these APIs in applications or websites with technologies like AJAX. A catalog and metadata is necessary, and this catalog must be usable by both humans and machines.

In the example above we would use the Salesforce REST API. If we were to take other datasets in the company, particularly those without REST APIs, and make them available in an online catalog like Socrata's we then get a REST API "built-in". Now the data is both discoverable and usable anywhere in the organization!

It has been notoriously difficult to share and integrate data across an enterprise and using a data-centric approach and REST APIs may be an answer.

Other Benefits of Open Data in Businesses

Leaders are more trusted

We know people are more likely to vote for politicians who who champion data transparency, but guess what? People are also more like to trust and follow leaders who who champion data transparency inside their organizations.

Organizations perform better

Open data can, and should be, linked to strategic goals. Are your organizations goals transparent? Are the metrics supporting those goals transparent? Is the actual data of the performance of the company against those goals shared openly across the firm?

Too many organizations create grandiose plans and goals that make for wonderful slideware. When it comes to tying them to hard metrics and then rigorously and publicly sharing progress many fall short. This means inside the organization the "chaos of competing priorities" continues and the company lacks focus and ultimately performance.

Value is unlocked

  • Open data can bring fresh insights into how companies operate and help management identify and eliminate "the sand in the gears" and other barriers to productivity.
  • Companies can choose to share proprietary data to create benchmarks that can improve overall industry performance.
  • Using open data, such as customer discussions on social media, companies can refine product requirements and create new products and services.
  • Companies can even consider ways in which to monetize the value of their data.

A few words about information security

Yes, "open data" sounds like it runs counter to everything we have been taught about information security and the principle of "least privilege". To be clear, there is information in an organization addressed by privacy laws, HIPAA, PCI and various and sundry other laws and regulations. This data must (of course) be protected as prescribed - even so, having a record of the datasets involved and who "owns" them is actually useful for both open data purposes (because it makes the fact we have the data, and who owns it, visible even if the dataset itself is not exposed) as well as information security requirements - security begins with information ownership and knowing who can grant/revoke access to sensitive information.

Lets also keep things in perspective - the vast majority of data in most organizations is simply "internal data" and is not confidential or sensitive. Yet it is information that people need to perform their jobs and often they struggle to find it, or use stale data, because they just don't know where to go or who to contact for the information - sand in the gears of daily operations.

Finally, REST API's are able to be secured, usually via a key or OAuth authentication strategy so that open data doesn't have to mean "openly accessible".

Summary

Think about how open data could apply to your business:

  • Do you know what the key operational metrics of your company are?
  • How transparent are those metrics?
  • Do you know which datasets support those metrics?
  • Do you know all the data that is available in your company? Is there a catalog of datasets?
  • Do you know who is responsible for the data (i.e. the data owner or steward)?
  • How accessible is the data?
  • Can data be explicitly shared, and when shared, can the dataset owner/publisher specify the role for each grantee - editor, viewer, etc.?
  • If data cannot be shared do we at least know who "owns" or is responsible for it?
  • Is it available for download in any reasonable format needed?
  • Is it accessible via an API so your internal developers can work with it?
  • Can your organization consume open data from outside sources easily and make it available across the company?

Sources:

Open Data Platforms:

Cloud Datasets:

APIs:

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