What is this playbook for?

Multiple organisations in every industry face challenges, whether sector-specific or motivated by wider societal issues. Many of these challenges could be addressed through the better collection, use and sharing of relevant data.

In our ‘Data infrastructure for common challenges’ user-needs report, we explored how those running or setting up data access initiatives – collaborative programmes that focus on collecting, using and sharing data to address a social, environmental or economic challenge – need to understand the current data landscape. A clear understanding of the landscape helps you effectively prioritise and plan your initial activities as you start to design or strengthen data infrastructure. This playbook has been designed to support those creating or running data access initiatives in developing a data landscape review so they can tackle a specific challenge or problem by addressing gaps and improving access to data.

We use the phrase ‘data landscape review’ to refer to a broad range of activities that support you in understanding the context in which your data access initiative operates. The context for this landscape review might be a specific market, sector, or community, as defined by the goals for the initiative. For example, your initiative might be focused on a sector, such as ‘connected and autonomous vehicles’; a cross-sector challenge, such as ‘childhood obesity’; or a place, such as a specific city. This playbook provides advice and resources to help you understand your data landscape and to develop specific plans to strengthen data infrastructure to address social, economic and environmental challenges.

'Play one: Explore the problem and how data can address it' provides guidance on how to identify how the problem your initiative is seeking to solve can be addressed by designing or strengthening data infrastructure in order to improve access to data.

'Play two: Map the data ecosystem' takes you through steps to identify and list stakeholders and map them against the key data and value exchanges within the initiative’s data ecosystem. This brings to light the gaps, barriers and opportunities in the data ecosystem to which your activities can align.

'Play three: Assess the policy, regulatory and ethical context' offers guidance and tools to help you understand the ethical context of your project, and assess any legal, regulatory and policy considerations that might impact the data access initiative.

'Play four: Assess the existing data infrastructure' takes you through steps to assess the relevant data infrastructure, including understanding what data assets you will need, how to access them and how to look for available open standards. It will also encourage you to reflect on the data skills relevant to the initiative.

'Play five: Plan for impact when designing your data initiative' gives recommendations on how to design a programme of work and activities that achieves the initiative’s desired impact. A logic-model approach will help you organise your inputs, activities and outputs to address gaps, barriers and opportunities, and achieve the desired impact of your initiative.

We end with some additional guidance on where to go next, including resources for data management, and ensuring the trustworthiness, sustainability, and scalability of your data access initiative.