Jakarta. The National Development Planning Agency, or Bappenas, on Friday launched Satu Data Indonesia, a data portal that stores all of the government data in one single repository for more data-driven policymaking. 

But the portal, which literally translates as “One Data Indonesia”, still has many things that the government will need to work on, such as amassing more data and a high-quality one at that.

“Satu Data Indonesia can serve as a ‘marketplace’ for government data that bridges supply and demand for data. Satu Data Indonesia must be linked to the data portals of every ministry and government institution in the country. We will be able to find all sorts of data, be it statistics, spatial or financial data, from across all government levels on Satu Data Indonesia,” Bappenas head Suharso Monoarfa said at the portal launch in Jakarta.

“Hopefully, the Satu Data Indonesia portal becomes the single source of truth and the ultimate source of government data in the country,” he said.

Bappenas reported that Satu Data Indonesia encompassed 136,501 datasets. 

About 43 out of 83 ministries and government institutions —or about 58 percent— have linked their data portals to Satu Data Indonesia and 26 out of 38 provinces are now linked to the recently launched portal, marking a 68 percent linkage rate at the provincial level. However, the stats are incredibly worrisome for the regency and city governments. Only 95 out of 514 regencies and cities across the archipelago have integrated their data portals into Satu Data Indonesia. 

“The data on the Satu Data Indonesia portal still has not met the ‘one data Indonesia’ principle. [...] It is also still very little when it comes to the data quantity and quality," Suharso told the conference.

“The data from the subnational government is still of poor quality. It is also inconsistent with the national aggregation,” he added.

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Suharso called for the need to establish governance for data collection and inspection through the Home Affairs Ministry’s regional development directorate general, as well as the National Statistics Agency (BPS), Geospatial Information Agency (BIG), and the Finance Ministry as the data supervisors.

According to Bappenas, 51 out of 83 ministries/government institutions have proposed their priority data for 2023. In total, Satu Data Indonesia has collected 1,804 priority data proposals for next year. About 23 percent of these proposals revolve around the 2023 government work plan.

At the conference, Suharso said he hoped government bodies could get over their “data possessiveness”.

“This is one of the non-technical challenges that we have to face. Our ego-sectoral tendencies are too big. Oftentimes, it is not about ‘data ownership’, but ‘data possessiveness’,” Suharso said while adding that the recently launched portal aims to foster interoperability across government bodies.