Technological advancements and the exponential growth of information are fundamentally transforming operational practices across various sectors, including the public sector. Government agencies are experiencing accelerated rates of data generation and digital archiving, driven by the proliferation of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals. As digital information expands in volume and complexity, the management, processing, storage, security, and disposition of this data become increasingly intricate. Emerging capture, search, discovery, and analysis tools are enabling organizations to derive insights from unstructured data. The government market is at a critical juncture, recognizing that information is a strategic asset. For government, it is imperative to protect, leverage, and analyze both structured and unstructured information to better serve mission requirements. As government leaders strive to evolve data-driven organizations to successfully accomplish their missions, they are laying the groundwork to correlate dependencies across events, people, processes, and information.
High-value government solutions will be created from a mashup of the most disruptive technologies:
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Mobile devices and applications
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Cloud services
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Social business technologies and networking
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Big Data and analytics
Big Data is one of the intelligent industry solutions and allows government to make better decisions by taking action based on patterns revealed by analyzing large volumes of data — related and unrelated, structured and unstructured.
However, accomplishing these goals requires far more than simply accumulating massive quantities of data. "Making sense of these volumes of Big Data requires cutting-edge tools and technologies that can analyze and extract useful knowledge from vast and diverse streams of information," as noted by Tom Kalil and Fen Zhao of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in a post on the OSTP Blog.
The White House took a step toward helping agencies find these technologies when it established the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative in 2012. The initiative included more than $200 million to make the most of the explosion of Big Data and the tools needed to analyze it.
The challenges that Big Data poses are nearly as daunting as its promise is encouraging. Storing data efficiently is one of these challenges. As always, budgets are tight, so agencies must minimize the per-megabyte price of storage and keep the data within easy access so that users can get it when they want it and how they need it. Backing up massive quantities of data heightens the challenge.
Analyzing the data effectively is another major challenge. Many agencies employ commercial tools that enable them to sift through the mountains of data, spotting trends that can help them operate more efficiently. (A recent study by MeriTalk found that federal IT executives think Big Data could help agencies save more than $500 billion while also fulfilling mission objectives.).
Custom-developed Big Data tools also are allowing agencies to address the need to analyze their data. For example, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Computational Data Analytics Group has made its Piranha data analytics system available to other agencies. The system has helped medical researchers find a link that can alert doctors to aortic aneurysms before they strike. It’s also used for more mundane tasks, such as sifting through resumes to connect job candidates with hiring managers.
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