Understanding the Value of Data

Data is a cornerstone of the digital economy. Successful economic management therefore increasingly requires optimising the use of data, from the organisational to societal level. Making the best use of data requires that we understand its value; however, this is far from straightforward. In the total economic value framework, data has value because users value what they could do with it now and what they might do with it in the future. In current use, the value could accrue directly from the time savings of users accessing data in highly interoperable form; it may also accrue indirectly through applications and services developed from the data. In an uncertain world data also has option value, in that it may find additional uses in the future. Through this lens, we can better understand where services (i.e., applications, research, and dissemination) may be applied to unlock the value data. We demonstrate the application of this framework through a case study of a large Australian public research organisation’s data asset depository.