Data

Scotland is well positioned to support change and innovation through the effective use of data.

Making data more available

Better data sharing can generate new insights, stimulate new ideas and deliver potential savings to the public sector of more than £1bn.

Our Open Data Strategy sets out our ambition for making data open and available for others to use and reuse. The open data platform, offering non-personal data about people and businesses, is now being used to inform and improve public service delivery in several areas.

We are making data more accessible across the Scottish public sector through collective data agreements, which will widen access and reduce costs.

Investing in excellence

Our open data platform will help Scotland become recognised as an attractive place to use data for research and innovation. There has been significant investment in organisations such as:

• Datalab
• the Administrative Data Research Centre
• the Farr Institute
• Urban Big Data Centre

We are delivering a series of pathfinder projects and a skills programme with Data Lab, which will:

• increase the number of new data scientists
• demonstrate the value of data innovation
• develop the data analytics skills of the existing workforce

Improving trust

We want to make sure that data is used for public benefit. We are a member of the Scottish Informatics and Linkage Collaboration, which places public trust at the heart of its work.

We are working to improve governance around data sharing, by assessing all secure, legal and ethical considerations — we will use the opportunities offered by the passage of the UK Government's Digital Economy Bill to support Scotland's data ambitions.