Current status and the future directions of open data: perceptions from the finnish industry

Open data has been a hot topic of the decade, as even the president of the United States has given input to the deployment of open data practices. Besides politics, open data has been discussed in the scientific literature. So far the big breakthrough has not happened, although several cases have proved that the open data concept works, and provides positive results in several ways. In this article, we study and discuss the perceptions towards open data in business. Our data consisted of 45 survey responses gathered from various Finnish companies. The results indicate that companies want to use open data in different ways --- ranging from application development to process efficiency --- but at the moment open data in Finland is scattered and most of the companies do not find what they need. These findings are in line with the previous research executed on the field and argue that open data still needs more positive examples of application, but the potential is real, and companies consider it as a useful concept.