We can imagine how much information we bombarded with every day and the pace of the data created will only speeded up with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT).
These days, people ranging from individuals to companies and organisations collect significant amount of data for them to perform tasks such as understand their customers and for marketing and operational decisions.
And as for the public, an open data ecosystem allows them to understand what their government is doing, thus making it an important facet to any well-functioning modern society.
An open data refers to the information that collected, produced data and paid for by the public and are freely available for anybody for reuse for any purpose.
Ecosystem which at first referred to as environment designed to adapt and evolved, thus the name ecosystem.
So, an open data ecosystem is an evolving digital environment where any information which collected, stored and produced made available to the public.
A data ecosystem comprises of three components; infrastructure, analytics and applications.
As a core of a data ecosystem, infrastructure functions to process, store and often also analyse data.
Then, the analytics tools used to help users find insights within the data.
Applications on the other hand, are big data businesses and start-ups which revolve around taking the analysed data and using it to offer end-users optimised insights in various fields including health, retail and energy.
To create an open data ecosystem, companies and organisation needs to apply several trends in directing their data ecosystem to fit in with a modern society that values transparency and public participatory.
With an overflowing of data and information created every day, organisation needs to avoid making their data ecosystem becoming too rigid and inflexible.
For a government to function well, they must allow citizens to know what their agenda are and how they are going to perform it for the benefits of the society.
For this, they must allow free access to government data and information and to share that information with the citizens.
Apart from free access, transparency it is also about sharing and reuse for any materials to be analysed and visualized.
One of the examples of open data ecosystem that Sarawak has is Sarawak Data portal.
So, apart from becoming transparent, this requires a data ecosystem to be flexible and open architecture.
Apart from that, in today’s industry driven society, businesses become more customer centric by preserving and expanding the existing customer’s relationship while attracting new ones.
By maintaining that good relationship that are open for feedbacks and information from customer and combine with the right analytic tools, these enable businesses to seek new insight and improve their operation as well as develop new products and services.
Besides this, an open data ecosystem must expand itself to become democratised within an organisation by allowing it to become a more mainstream activity.
These days, some of the industry entertains the idea of having ‘citizen data scientist’.
Organisations from all industries that are data-driven, but with a shortage of trained data scientists are empowering their data analytics professionals and other domain information experts with the tools and support them need to become citizen data scientists.
As a non-full-fledged data scientist who mainly performs visual analytics, they will build and test analytics models, perform statistical analysis, and employ machine learning features embedded in next-generation tools and workbenches.
There are many benefits that come with setting up an open data ecosystem.
For the government side of view, an open data ecosystem contributes to improving the efficiency of public services through efficiency in processes and delivery of public services.
The social welfare can also improve as the public benefits from the information that is transparent and accessible by allowing collaboration, public participation and social innovation.
Apart from that, the economy may also benefit from easier access to information, content and knowledge by contributing to developing innovation services and creating new business models.
