Overview

Making data available to those who need it can enable better decisions and more effective policies – for example, through benchmarking, open innovation and supply chain optimisation. In return, this can help create more innovative and efficient products, increase access to public services and generally improve our lives and our societies while increasing economic productivity. Better access to better data has value in economic terms as well as societal value for individuals and communities.

But data and data sharing can also cause harm. The use and misuse of data can cause people to fear data and lose trust in services or organisations, to the point that they opt out of data collection. Similarly, the fear of causing harm or being involved in a scandal can lead organisations to avoid collecting, using or sharing data. Without access to high-quality data, decision making, policies, services, innovation and productivity suffer.

Trust and trustworthiness are therefore key, not only to realising the societal and economic value of data, but also to companies and organisations realising the value of their services, products and ecosystems. By operating in a trustworthy way, an organisation should be able to create value while limiting harms; and is more likely to be trusted by the people organisations and ecosystems it interacts with and relies upon.

In this guidebook, we introduce '10 elements of trustworthy data stewardship' which are intended to provide a systematic way of examining the trustworthiness of an organisation, its data practices and any data it collects, manages, uses or shares. We also provide tools and resources to help organisations build or improve their trustworthiness in each of those elements of trustworthy data stewardship.

We use ‘trustworthy’ to mean an organisation is worthy of being trusted, while ‘trust’ refers to an organisation actually being trusted by an individual, organisation or ecosystem. An organisation can be trustworthy without being trusted (and trusted without being trustworthy), and so we will be exploring both concepts throughout this guidebook.