How Data Informs Business

Introduction

As seen throughout this report, data is at the heart of the digital economy – it is the raw material for the development of new products and services and refinement of existing ones. It is also a new asset class, worth billions of dollars. Data is also a policy area that has been evolving very rapidly in the past few years because of the rapid changes in technologies and their effects on relevant data policies. Policy makers struggle to keep up, despite efforts to issue technology-neutral data policy frameworks. As nontraditional sources of data become more common, and data is used in entirely novel ways, questions arise about who owns what data, who can do what with it, and what protections are afforded to whom.

One overarching message is that data policies can achieve greater impact using a dynamic ecosystem approach. Governments need to play a multidimensional role and create new partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders to achieve them. This chapter discusses four dimensions of this question.

First, the chapter briefly reviews policies for building strong data infrastructure to support making data available, including those for management of data assets and data governance. It focuses on open data and principles for data sharing between government, businesses, and individuals.

Second, the chapter considers policies geared toward building consumer trust and principles for setting limits on what can be done with data, such as data protection and privacy (including cross-border data flows and data localization) and data security. Trust encourages governments, the private sector, and users to innovate and benefit from the data revolution.

Third, data security is examined. The lack of a secure and trusted environment could delay both the adoption of data-enabled services and products and, potentially, their offering by the private sector. This could put emerging market economies at a disadvantage in participation in global innovation, educational, and commercial networks. Finally, the chapter covers complementary policies that facilitate building a data economy. Those include policies to support innovation, and those that help build digital skills and entrepreneurship.

As a rapidly evolving area of policy, the examples presented here focus on recent changes. Many come from the European Union (EU), as the European Commission (EC) is moving faster and farther than most in this area. The potential ease of transferring data, including through accessing websites across borders, gives the standards an international dimension (figure 6.1). Thus, new regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are of interest for the principles they espouse and for the practical issues they raise for anyone digitally interacting with them, including developing countries.

Figure 6.1 A framework for data policies