Opening up data to help startups and small business grow

People have used open data to make applications that predict the weather, track trams and even identify trees.

But open data is something that small and medium businesses rarely make the most of, despite its potential to help them make better decisions and grow.

What Victorian businesses told us

That puzzled us, so we talked to small businesses to understand their needs. They told us that:

• while data is available from private sector sources, it’s often expensive.
• data is often hard to interpret.
• it’s easy to ‘get lost in the layers’ of government websites when looking for data.

While our open data portal www.data.vic.gov.au is the place to discover and access thousands of Victorian Government open datasets, we found businesses are often time poor and didn’t have the expertise to turn this data into meaningful insights.

Location-based information is important

If someone wants to start a business, location is important. They want somewhere that ensures their customers, employees and suppliers have easy access. Getting this information would normally involve accessing multiple spreadsheets and documents from a variety of sites. That’s a lot of extra work for small businesses.

How we’re helping businesses access data

Using what we had learnt from businesses in Victoria about how they want to use government data, we built MyVictoria.

MyVictoria meaningfully connects people with the data they need to make informed decisions for their business.

Our aim for MyVictoria was to bring together data sets that are important to business and make them useable. Using co-design processes, MyVictoria filtered out the top 50 open datasets within government such as:

• demographics
• businesses by industry
• building permits
• transport
• planned government projects
• key services and facilities

How we keep the data up to date

Our users need MyVictoria to be reliable, so we work to keep the data as accurate as possible and up to date.

This involves:

• cleaning the data
• bringing it together in one format
• automating these processes and
• working closely with data owners

Shaping our product with a “co-design” approach

Spending time talking to business owners helped us find the best ways to visualise the data, enabling quick and easy insights.

Users told us they wanted:

• a single and clear search function to help with location navigation
• heat maps and single value maps
• the ability to make comparisons between different locations

Other data small businesses want

In doing our research, it was interesting to learn what else influences small to medium business decision making.

Business owners often have families or other commitments outside of work and were also looking for data on schools or aged care homes to allow them to consider this information in their decision process.

In some of our interviews there were also some business owners that admitted to making decisions just based on gut feel. However if they had more consumable information at their fingertips they would use this information to help guide their decisions.

So where to from here?

MyVictoria is hosted on the Victorian Government’s Single Digital Presence (SDP) platform. We are in the process of making all data available as open data via Data Vic and as APIs (Application programming interfaces).

Our next step is to explore how we can make the data visualisation components used to build MyVictoria available to other government departments and agencies.

We are using the lessons learned from our other digital projects such as Engage Victoria, SDP, and our API Developers Portal. Building something within government with similar functionality shouldn’t need to be built or paid for from scratch again and again.

MyVictoria shows how open data can be delivered in a way that’s useful, with benefits for business, communities and government. If we are to fully realise the value of open government data, projects like this, with a focus on users, can help us get there.

It’s exciting to be working on a digital product that enables citizens to make important decisions with government data.