The ROI of Open Government Data: New Jobs

The 'ROI of open data' framing in late 2011 was driven by the political need to justify continuing public investment in data-publication infrastructure. The McKinsey Global Institute's Open Data: Unlocking Innovation and Performance with Liquid Information report — which estimated trillions in annual global economic value across multiple sectors — wouldn't be published until October 2013, but the underlying analytical approach (counting jobs, economic activity, and consumer-surplus value attributable to reuse of public datasets) was already in use by the European PSI Group, by Deloitte's research arm, and by the Vickery Review for the European Commission.

By the time of this November 2011 piece, the canonical reference cases were already well-established: weather data underwriting the U.S. private weather-services industry, GPS data underpinning a vast geospatial-services market, SEC filing data feeding the financial-information industry, and the cumulative employment numbers in firms whose primary input was a publicly-published dataset. The argument the article made — that open-data publication produces measurable downstream employment — was the strongest political case for the publication-infrastructure funding the FY2012 budget cycle was about to scrutinise.

The argument has aged unevenly. Some of the predicted economic-value categories materialised at scale — geospatial reuse, financial data, weather services. Others did not, particularly in jurisdictions where the data-publication infrastructure was funded but the upstream data-quality and stewardship work wasn't. The reuse-friction story, more than the publication-quantity story, is what determined where the ROI actually appeared.