How information sharing drives economic growth

Agencies increasingly look to data analytics to generate trends and create innovative solutions to their complex problems.

Meanwhile, most agencies have a wealth of information in their data warehouses that can improve economic vitality, if analyzed quickly and provided to businesses. The question is: What kind of role should entrepreneurial companies play to expedite the economic vitality? 

Throughout the past decade, many businesses focused on reducing their cycle time rather than increasing their scale to be more productive and agile. However, it is governments that have the relevant data on demographics, tax basis, employments, development plans, new school projects, airport traffic, etc. that help businesses proactively make adjustments and improve their cycle time.

This chain effect starts with the data that needs to be analyzed continuously to feed the business community, and ends with creating new and improved opportunities for the businesses. The concept is unlocking innovation with rapidly changing information to increase visibility of trends and fluctuations in business activities.

General economic trends lead to real-time operations, with continuous torrents of data coming in from all angles. Agile analytics makes it possible to ingest this enormous volume of data to explore arrays and determine useful information that can point to new opportunities for business services and operational efficiency at government levels.

The release of open data by government agencies enables entrepreneurs to tap into the basis for data analysis across industries. For example, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has worked with Google to post information such as awards and published applications in an easy and searchable format. Entrepreneurs can then leverage analytics tools and capabilities to provide supplementary layers of useful information to data applications.

The value of making information available to businesses in a timely manner has been recognized by the community. There is also a common understanding that the proactive dissemination of business trends and anomalies will be very helpful to small business owners who are the job engine growth.

The economy has benefited from the government distribution of GPS and weather data among many other forms of big data in the past. As a result, several companies have been established, directly impacting economic growth through job creation.

Open data and agile analytics will bring this principle into every small and large community around the country.

Data analytics can play a significant role to collapse the information gaps between businesses and governments. Information sharing is an innovation engine, and productivity rise is directly correlated to data awareness.

Agile analytics can help uncover multiple business trends in population movements, customer preferences, demographics, commerce traffic, transportation, etc. However, there are some common elements in how value is created such as population segments, income per capita per zip code, approved building permits in a specific geography, etc. These valuable information themes are direct byproducts of agile analytics that if turned into applications and made available could enhance business productivity, efficiency, decision making, and new business activities.

As businesses start leveraging available and useful information, they will participate in improving the accuracy and value of information through a feedback mechanism that further leads to additional data cleansing and sharing opportunities.

This cycle can only gather momentum if private industry and public agencies promote an energetic ecosystem that provides relevant and timely information sharing policies for all data users and participants.