sheehan alam

Hoarding Data Hinders Innovation

You don’t see me praise Microsoft too often, but they’ve got a pretty neat blog up about utilizing technology to solve business and political problems. The common motif is to open up data. Hospitals need to stop hoarding data. The government needs to stop hoarding data. Facebook needs to stop hoarding data. The internet couldn’t be what it is today without the open-ness of the the data.

IT departments should expose the information they have via web-services so others can consume it, and mash it up. We have RSS, real-time search, SOAP and millions of other protocols to let the world know, and that brings me to my cliche clinching quote - “knowledge is power.”