Intelligent Data Management – A New Approach to Open Data
Ben Searle
Location Analytics/Omnilink
Bensearle54@gmail.com
Executive Summary
This presentation provides a brief overview of current data management practices and
identifies the ‘missing’ element that is required to ensure an intelligent data management
approach is used by organisations wishing to leverage their valuable data assets. The
presentation is based on the practical activities being undertaken by Land Information New
Zealand (LINZ) in their Data Discovery program, which comprises an important element of
the Canterbury Spatial Data Infrastructure. This initiative is aimed at making more data
available and also supports the NZ Government’s Open Data policy.
The presentation will examine the real barriers to making an organisation’s data available to
the public? It provides a different perspective on how data is managed in most organisations
and how traditional data workflows are actually creating the barrier to data release and this
approach is also hindering the value of that data once it is in the public domain.
Does your organisation manage data intelligently? Does it apply appropriate processes to
data management activities and how engaged are the staff responsible for ensuring effective
data management? NASA would believe that they operated an effective data management
regime, but their loss in 1999 of the Mars Climate Orbiter was a result of not applying an
‘intelligent’ approach to data management for the data used in that mission. Could your
organisation afford a failure as significant as theirs?
What differentials ‘intelligent’ data management from how most organisations manage their
data assets today? The differentiator is empowering the people responsible for the input
phase of the data management cycle, having them understand the value of their efforts to the
organisation, even if it doesn’t directly benefit them. Above all though, it is for senior
management to value and support the often-missing element in data management practices,
which consist of simply creating effective documentation for the data and for management to
understand and appreciate that the costs of implementing intelligent data management are
orders of magnitude less than the costs of not taking this approach.
A beneficial outcome of applying intelligent data management principles to an organisations
work practices is that data sets will be well documented, and consequently will be suitable for
publishing in the public domain as an open data set. Intelligent data management principles
directly benefit an organisation, and by applying these principles an organisation can be
comfortable about releasing the data to the public, and the data set will also be of greater
value to the public.