One subject that has not received a lot of coverage in the analytics blogging circle is the current administration’s data.gov project. While still in its infancy the data.gov is an outcome of the government’s transparency initiative called Open Government Directive. In December, all government agencies were asked to produce and publish three new ‘high value’ public data feeds on data.gov website.
The data.gov site still has to work through some of the kinks but eventually it will become a wonderful resource for the data analytics industry. Probably as critical as the US Census data and its American Factfinder tool, which has spawned multiple companies and supports all kinds of interesting analysis across a wide range of industries.
The Sunlight Foundation tracks the new datasets that are being released. For example one of the Labor departments datasets is the “weekly reports of fatalities, catastrophes and other events.” The data, compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, briefly describes workplace accidents, identifies the company at which and the date when the accident occurred. I think a lot of insurance companies with worker compensation insurance products will be interested in analyzing the data to better price their products. Or take for instance the IRS internal migration data by state and county based on tax returns. Can it be used by moving companies to better understand the shift in demand for their services? There are thousands of such datasets available, and a lot of them will potentially be valuable to businesses. The value of a dataset to business like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. This makes the categorization challenging but at the same time makes it interesting for businesses as it can be a potential source of competitive advantage. If you can figure out to interpret the IRS migration data to better align your marketing campaigns for your moving and relocation assistance business, you can get better return on investment on your spend than your competition.
It is time for organizations to look outside their firewalls and build a strategy of collecting, incorporating and analyzing external data into their analytics and strategic planning efforts. Companies like Infochimps, which is a private clearinghouse and market place for third-party data are betting on this trend. They already collect, cleanse and format the data.gov datasets so that it is analysis ready.
Take out the time to check the datasets that are available. You never know what you may find.
