Background

Welcome to our first white paper in a series of research reports and white papers from Deloitte Analytics on the topic of 'competing on insights'.

Open data – Driving growth, ingenuity and innovation has been researched and written in collaboration with Professor Nigel Shadbolt, head of the Web and Internet Science Group at the University of Southampton and co-director of the Government's new Open Data Institute.

Data is the new capital of the global economy, and as organisations seek renewed growth, stronger performance and more meaningful customer engagement, the pressure to exploit data is immense.

In recent months, businesses have become hooked on 'big data' – the term coined to describe the unremitting increase in data volume and the technologies needed to collect, store, manage and analyse it. In contract, many businesses have a blinkered view of open data. Allowing anyone to use and redistribute data freely is viewed chiefly as a mechanism employed by governments to increase public service transparency and enable citizens to hold officials to account.

This publication presents Deloitte's vision for open data – a subject that has, until now, been overshadowed unhelpfully by considerations of 'big data'. Open data is about much more than improving government transparency and it is now emerging from its silent revolution.

Key findings

Our vision is that open data, and not simply 'big data', will drive growth, ingenuity and innovation in the UK economy. This is because we believe that:

  1. every business will have a strategy to exploit the rapidly growing estate of open data
  2. businesses will increasingly open up their data to revolutionise the way they compete
  3. businesses will use open data to inspire customer engagement
  4. businesses will work with Government to establish a new paradigm in data responsibility and privacy.

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Open data – Driving growth, ingenuity and innovation

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