6 Reasons Why Governments Should Build Data Visualization Platforms
Data are powerful assets for the public sector, companies and citizens, but open data portals are often incomplete, opaque and hard to work with. Over the last 8 years, with more than 40 worldwide projects, Datawheel has developed expertise in building impactful data distribution platforms for governments.
This article is intended for people in the public sector looking to gain insights from their data and make a major impact by publishing data in a simple and easy-to-understand way. Here is what we have learned in a nutshell:
1. Contribute to transparency and data democratization
Governments generate tons of data every day, and it is usually stored in siloed systems that are not accessible by citizens.
Even if public data is made available in government websites, most of the time it’s in heavy files that are hard to understand and work with for non-data-literate people. They are also hidden in excel or csv files impossible to find for search engines.
To make open data really open, we need to make it searchable, and for that we need to bring data to the surface of the web.
— César A. Hidalgo, Scientific American
How can we achieve more transparency for public data? Data visualization platforms are a way to make statistical data easy to understand, with a more intuitive interface and with little to no technical skills required.
2. Increase the reuse of public data
Data visualization platforms can be powerful public goods. From what we have observed, a big advantage of building such platforms is the noticeable boost in local activities enabled by the access to this data. It makes the life of start-ups and local projects much easier, letting them develop innovative solutions and make better decisions based on reliable and understandable data.
Every census and data collection process has a cost. When open and reused, governments benefit from the activity it generates. You would be surprised to see who the end-user is, and how this data can be used by various stakeholders outside but also inside of governments.
For example, the local offices of the Secretariat of Economy of Mexico regularly use Data México to build impactful reports and to support economic diversification strategies. They use the platform to visualize socioeconomic differences between municipalities within a state, rapidly identify the geographical concentration of activities, and to inform policy design.
3. Showcase and promote your country
A modern data distribution platform such as DataMéxico or Estonia’s Foreign Trade Application can make a great first impression of the country to international stakeholders and investors. It will instantly send the message that the country’s government agency is reliable, well-structured, in line with new technologies, and easy to work with. These platforms can play a relevant role when companies decide to invest in a country.
As these platforms grow and incorporate new datasets, they become powerful analytical tools for different agencies, boosting intra-government collaboration, interoperability must be a key point when you start to design your platform.
4. You can offer different tools for different users
Data platforms need to be adapted to different types of users with different technical levels and needs, and that’s where user research is key. While interactive reports and visualizations are the preferred functionality for non-technical users, other features can be integrated into the site to allow more in-depth analysis, access the data through an API or download custom datasets.
5. Identifies anomalies in your data
You might think your data is too messy and could never look as nice. Be reassured, data is messy in most countries, developed or not. Data is usually imputed by humans, and by definition, prone to error.
Data visualization platforms will be a great way to find anomalies in your datasets. This is a positive externality we have seen over different projects. It’s not uncommon to find missing data, and unexpected values when creating a visualization. Data management is an iterative process. If you don’t look at your data -and have a process to validate it- it’s harder to detect outliers.
6. Automatization will not kill your job, but make it more impactful
Over the different projects we have built we often met data analysts who are concerned about being replaced by these platforms. This has never been the case. Automated reporting and visualization tools do not replace the analysts’ work. They make data accessible and easy to explore for any user, so that data analysts can spend less time cleaning datasets and creating the same reports every month, and can focus on exploring innovative and deeper analysis.
To sum up
The public sector can benefit today from this technology, and experience a change of paradigm. This change will not only make the analysts’ jobs more interesting, but will benefit the whole country by increasing transparency, fostering the reuse of open data by public officers and entrepreneurs, and helping attract and locate investment.
