Need help with developing or delivering your data strategy?

Whether you’re in the private, public or third sectors, we can help you: advance your data strategy; implement effective data sharing; apply data ethics; develop privacy technologies and anonymisation techniques; and develop data standards.

• Data ethics
• Data strategy
• Data sharing
• Data privacy and anonymisation
• Data standards development

Data ethics

We envision a future where people, organisations and communities use data to make better decisions, more quickly.

Data ethics is a rapidly emerging area, and a failure to handle data ethically can impact people negatively and lead to a loss of trust in projects, products or organisations. We can help:

• Improve your understanding of data and digital ethics through skills and knowledge development, and guide you through courses such as Data Ethics Professional and Introduction to Data Ethics
• Discover and adopt methodologies to help you apply a data ethics lens to service design and delivery
• Apply our tools, such as the Data Ethics Canvas, and the Consequence Scanning toolkit
• Understand complex and specialised terminology, and how technology can help you be more trustworthy and trusted with data
• Benchmark and improve ethical data practice using our Data Ethics Maturity Model
• Discover how to assess the trustworthiness of other organisations and the data they hold
• Learn how technologies like AI and data science relate to trust and trustworthiness

Open data strategy

We can help to maximise the success of your open data strategy by showing how the better use of data can transform your organisation and help deliver organisational objectives.

Many organisations are failing to realise the true value of data, yet it is becoming increasingly vital to stay competitive, manage risk and keep up to date with legislation.

We can help by identifying opportunities around use of datal; setting the strategic direction and vision for use of data; developing a set of principles; and creating/advising on a data strategy and action plan focused on improving confidence and trust.

The ODI’s 10 years of experience in working with every aspect of data – from collection and publication to analysis and governance – can help guide your organisation on each step of its data journey, from initial strategy formulation through to benefits realisation.

From ensuring your data vision is both ambitious and realistic, through to finding new and tangible ways to demonstrate the value of improved data and analytics, our consultancy, research and technology teams can provide sound and practical guidance.

We can help:

• Set the strategic direction for data
• Inspire senior staff to take a data-informed approach
• Identify a set of activities that will help your organisation achieve its data strategy
• Highlight current challenges and opportunities for data users and beneficiaries
• Specify data infrastructure needs
• Create an action plan and provide a sense of personal responsibility and buy-in to taking a data-informed approach
• Discover data flows and silos and the impacts on value
• Design data infrastructure, from simple repositories through to data meshes. Or data sharing and publication policies and processes
• Analyse holistic requirements, from user needs and fine-grained functional requirements to high-level organisational needs
• Understand your data ecosystem
• Prototype and develop and proof of concept projects assessing the value of investing in data-driven approaches
• Advise on embedding a culture to embed your strategy

Data sharing

We can help you to share data with customers and partners in a sustainable and trustworthy way, and understand the maturity of your organisation’s data sharing practices.

By benchmarking current performance – related to data management processes; knowledge and skills; customer support and engagement; investment and financial performance; and strategic oversight and data ethics – we make it easy for you to understand areas of strength and areas in need of improvement.

At the ODI, we have published a range of guides to formats and licensing, developed advice on topics such as identifier schemes, and created prototype data publication platforms.

Whatever the data you’re working with, and whatever audience needs to access it, we can help you ensure its discoverability, intelligibility, reusability, and compliance.

We can help to:

• Assess your readiness to share data with customers and partners
• Apply the Open Data Maturity Model to assess how you publish and consume open data
• Create an open data strategy and action plan
• Demonstrate how well you share, publish and consume data
• Explore requirements to ensure your organisation can share data in a sustainable and trustworthy way
• Decide which platforms and tools are best for data publishing
• Discover data cataloguing and automated metadata tools
• Select the right data standard for datasets
• Choose the right data licences
• Publish data that is easy to read, use and analyse
• Ensure data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)

Data privacy and anonymisation

We can help you navigate this complex topic. We can help you understand how privacy technologies work and how they fit within securing data in your organisation. We offer expert advice on anonymisation techniques. We run training, publish guides and reports, and advise organisations including the NHS.

We can help to:

• Explore the balance between data sharing and privacy
• Demystify complex technologies like differential privacy, synthetic data and federated learning
• Select the right anonymisation tool for you
• Clarify the legal landscape

Data standards development

Open standards for data are powerful tools for unlocking data silos, enabling data sharing, and driving innovation and sector change.

To be effective, standards adoption and development require intensive collaboration and a profound shared understanding of technical challenges.

Building on our extensive experience with standards initiatives such as OpenActive, Open Banking, and Open Referral UK, we can help guide you through the landscape of open data standards, from initial exploration of the costs and benefits, through to delivery and sector change.

We can help:

• Assess costs and benefits of standards adoption and development
• Understand the context, sector drivers, and data ecosystem (both existing and desired) to validate whether a new standard is indeed the right solution
• Shape and design new standards
• Equip you for your onward journey to develop, launch, maintain and review new standards — including advice on ongoing governance, industry engagement and technical ecosystem development
• Facilitate stakeholder consultation for standards development
• Develop standards formalisation and ratification

Benchmarking and improving performance

We can help you to understand the maturity of your organisation’s data sharing practices and help you take steps to share data with customers and partners in a sustainable and trustworthy way.

By benchmarking current performance related to data management processes, knowledge and skills, customer support and engagement, investment and financial performance, and strategic oversight and data ethics, we will make it easy for you to understand areas of strength, areas in need of improvement and offer recommendations for next steps.

We can help you to:

• assess how ready you are to share data with customers and partners
• assess the extent to which ethical collection, use and sharing of data is embedded in your processes
• assess or demonstrate how well you share, publish and consume data
• understand what you need to put in place to ensure your organisation can share data in a sustainable and trustworthy way
• benchmark and improve ethical data practice

Setting the strategic direction

We can help to maximise the success of your data transformation programme by inspiring senior staff to see how better use of data can transform your organisation and help deliver organisational objectives.

By thinking through the range of factors that are important in creating a data-informed business and learning from other organisations’ approaches, we will work with you to evolve the approach for your organisation to be more data-informed.

We can help you to:

• set the strategic direction for data
• inspire senior staff to take a data-informed approach
• identify a set of activities that will help your organisation achieve its data strategy
• create a sense of personal responsibility & buy-in to taking a data-informed approach.

Maximise opportunities across your sector

We help industry leaders identify opportunities and define their role in emerging data sharing ecosystems, guiding them towards data ecosystem designs that deliver social and business impact. As an independent, vendor-neutral partner, we can help you map the route to impact that’s right for your industry and your priorities – guided by stakeholder and market needs, not technology solutions.

Together we’ll plot a strategic path that uncovers the opportunities for collaborative data ecosystems, identifies the challenges you want to address, the partners you should engage, and the organisational changes you need to make to deliver on the role you are best placed to play.

We can help you to:

• leverage data collaboration opportunities to address a societal or business challenge
• understand the role you can play in enabling data sharing and innovation in your sector or across sectors, based on your unique strengths
• identify the partners you can work with, based on alignment of interests
• build a business case to get involved in a collaborative data ecosystem
• articulate the value of data sharing to galvanise action by others
• set up a data sharing or innovation collaboration
• explore business models to maximise return of investment through shared data across a sector or cross-sector collaboration