Open Data Revolution

Data is all around us and amassing at a tremendous rate. Whether we are creating it consciously like when we make a banking transaction, or unconsciously like when we walk into a store with our mobile phone running a location based service, data is growing and the question that arises is whether there is any benefit from it?

Traditionally, companies had access to their business data internally like sales activities that they can use to access and measure cost, profits and margins. On the other hand, individuals keep a rolodex of business contacts or friends in address books. But as social media, and interactions on the Internet have grown, so has the growth of data in repositories not necessarily in the domain of the original user. Today, businesses use Salesforce.com to track sales activity and individuals share their contacts on portable devices like phones or on social network sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. So as the avenues for data consumption and sharing have increased, data has naturally grown. The question still arises as to whether this is a good thing? Maybe it can be, if only if we create an open data revolution, and free this data from its silos and allow all of us to consume, update, and use this data.

The open data revolution is in a lot of ways analogous to the open source movement. There was fear in the beginning, how can you trust and manage a group of many to work collectively to build reliable software? Will this put software businesses out of business? How can this be supported and maintained? However by most accounts open source has proven to be successful, and projects like Linux, Firefox, Android, and others are proof of that.

Can letting data in hands of the collective wisdom of the crowd also drive innovations around usage and application? Of course there will be fear, around privacy, control, and security, but this is no different than the fear we have around our data out on the internet already. With the proper filters, and obscurities in place we can try to alleviate some of these concerns, and then we can drive towards creating an arena where innovation and applicability around data can start to explode. Take your mobile phone’s address book; by itself it’s only valuable to you by recording your contacts phone numbers. But when you combine it with location based data, and data about the likes and interests of the people in your address book, then you have a real time location sensitive tool that can connect you and your friends to what’s of interest to both of you when you are near each other. Imagine the innovation that can happen by adding even more data to this equation!

My guess is that the open data revolution will start to help with the ROI story with social media. If you can merge the collective wisdom generated from social media — with the business data that drives business decisions and processes, the conclusions businesses make around how to increase customer satisfaction, affect brand perception, or keep engaged with their employees – this will align business with the target audience they are hoping to affect and communicate with. As such, we are starting to see the open data revolution taking hold, whether it’s OpenID (http://openid.net/) or the Open Data Protocol (OData – http://www.odata.org/) which major companies like Google and Facebook are embracing to allow others to innovate off their data, and for them to innovate off of others. The Open Data Revolution may already be here, data interoperability, collaboration and innovation are just around the corner.