Trust in Data: Our New Research for the Open Data Institute (ODI) Reveals the Data Assurance Sector.

We need trustworthy data that works for everyone. To provide that trust, organisations that use and share data need to assure not only that it is fit for purpose, but that the processes that were used to create and manage that data are also well-governed. Emerging data assurance service offerings are being developed to help organisations build confidence in data. However, as with other emerging sectors, very little is known about the businesses that offer these services.

With the aim to better understand the Data Assurance market, the Open Data Institute (ODI) recently commissioned Frontier Economics and glass.ai to conduct a review of the sector. A fundamental building block of this research was to create a unique dataset of Data Assurance firms using glass.ai’s intelligent web-crawler. Through desk research Frontier Economics developed a definition of the characteristics of data assurance offerings, and the glass.ai crawler read UK business websites and used language understanding AI to identify businesses that matched those characteristics. Reviewing a sample of output, Frontier Economics were able to further refine the model and feed this back into the crawler to fine-tune the final data set to precisely match the requirements of the research.

This data set identified 890 firms in the UK with a total of over 25,000 employees involved in the delivery of data assurance. Around 75% of these businesses offer consulting services to other businesses, and focus on businesses that are likely to hold personal data such as retailers or marketers. Analysing this data further, Frontier Economics produced four key insights around the size, age, embeddedness and range of data assurance services available. You can read a summary of the research findings here and the full report here.