Contributing to the Development of 'Public Data Opening' Services and Products... Positive Impact on Job Creation and Sales Increase

Survey on Companies Using Public Data... 80% of Respondents Utilize It for New Service and Product Development
83% of Data-Using Companies Say "Public Data Expands Employment"

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Cheol-young] Public data opened by public institutions has been found to contribute to productivity improvement and entrepreneurship, such as job creation, sales increase, and cost reduction for companies. However, the lack of public data processing and analysis technology and professional personnel was identified as an urgent issue to be resolved.

According to the “2020 Public Data Utilization Enterprise Survey Results” by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety on the 26th, private companies mainly use public data for business innovation such as developing new services and products (79.5%) and improving existing services and products (77.0%), and it is also utilized for internal management efficiency (26.5%).

In particular, more than half of the companies that responded to the survey, 54.2%, answered that public data plays an important role in the startup process.

The types of services using public data were surveyed in the order of information provision services (65.1%), sales of collected and processed data (19.3%), and sales of analysis results (18.2%). Companies utilizing public data were analyzed to be positive in terms of job creation, sales increase, and cost reduction.

It was also found to contribute to job and sales growth. 83.3% of companies utilizing public data responded that employment expanded due to the use of public data, and the degree to which public data contributes to corporate sales was on average 31.7% per company, showing an increasing trend. The contribution rate of public data to sales was 29.5% in 2018 and 31.5% in 2019. In terms of productivity improvement, 40% (342 companies) of the respondents answered that there was a cost reduction effect due to the use of public data.

However, the lack of data processing and analysis technology and professional personnel was cited as a difficulty. About half (49.6%) of the companies using public data pointed out the lack of data processing and analysis technology and professional personnel as a major business difficulty, followed by issues of low accuracy (32.5%), update-related problems (31.5%), and open standard-related problems (29.6%).

Accordingly, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety plans to promote various practical policies that companies can feel, such as improving quality issues like data accuracy revealed in this survey and strengthening support for professional personnel.

While further strengthening the quality inspection of public data standards and open data, the ministry plans to continue expanding the “Public Data Enterprise Matching Support Project,” which supports the construction and processing of public data by each institution, and the “Public Data Youth Internship Program” for training data personnel, following last year.

Seo Boram, Public Data Policy Officer at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, said, “This survey confirmed that public data plays an important role in creating business for companies,” and added, “We will make various efforts to open more public data that helps corporate activities.”