Novel and more accessible forms of information from government and private sources represent a new and rapidly growing piece of the big-data puzzle.
Not all data that’s valuable is internal and proprietary. New initiatives by governments as diverse as those of the United States, Mexico, and Singapore are opening the spigots of readily usable public data. Corporate information too is becoming more “liquid,” moving across the economy as companies begin sharing data with their business partners and, sometimes, consumers. Also surging is the richness of the information from data aggregators, which are assembling, rendering anonymous, and selling (to interested third parties) a wide range of data flows. Then add huge volumes of data from social-media interactions, available from providers of digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
These new sources of open data represent an expanding trove of largely unexploited value. One everyday illustration of open data at work is a smartphone app that uses real-time data (provided by transit authorities) to tell commuters when the next bus or train will arrive. Using open or pooled data from many sources—all the businesses in a particular sector, for example—often combined with proprietary big data, can help companies develop insights they could not have uncovered with internal data alone.
Demographic data, financial transactions, health-care benchmarks, and real-time location data are among the myriad new information sources a company can exploit to create novel products and services and to make its operations more effective and efficient. New research from the McKinsey Global Institute, the McKinsey Center for Government, and McKinsey’s Business Technology Office suggests that $3 trillion or more in annual value could arise from the use of open data in applications across seven domains of the global economy (exhibit). About a third of those potential benefits would involve the use of benchmarks to identify areas for improvement.
Whether or not individual executives at large companies choose to work with open data of various types, the magnitude of the value at stake suggests that some of them will—and that these applications will probably affect a wide range of industries, markets, and customers.
