Technological advancements and the exponential growth of information are reshaping business practices across numerous sectors, including the government sector. The rates of government data generation and digital archiving are climbing rapidly, driven by the proliferation of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors and gadgets, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals. As digital information expands and becomes increasingly complex, the management, processing, storage, security, and disposition of data also grow more intricate. New tools for capture, search, discovery, and analysis are enabling organizations to extract valuable insights from unstructured data. The government sector is at a critical juncture, recognizing information as a strategic asset. Governments must now protect, leverage, and analyze both structured and unstructured information to better serve the public and meet mission objectives. As government leaders strive to evolve into data-driven organizations that successfully achieve their missions, they are laying the groundwork to correlate dependencies across events, people, processes, and information.
High-value government solutions will emerge from a combination 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 serves as an intelligent industry solution that empowers the government to make superior decisions by acting on patterns revealed through the analysis of large volumes of data—whether related or unrelated, structured or unstructured.
However, achieving these results 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," Tom Kalil and Fen Zhao of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote in a post on the OSTP Blog.
The White House took a significant step toward helping agencies locate these technologies by establishing the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative in 2012. This initiative allocated over $200 million to capitalize on the explosion of Big Data and the tools necessary to analyze it.
The challenges posed by Big Data are nearly as daunting as its promise is encouraging. Efficiently storing data is one such challenge. With budgets always tight, agencies must minimize the cost per megabyte of storage while keeping data easily accessible so users can retrieve it when and how they need it. Backing up massive quantities of data further intensifies this challenge.
Effectively analyzing data is another major hurdle. Many agencies utilize commercial tools that allow them to sift through mountains of data, identifying trends that can enhance operational efficiency. (A recent study by MeriTalk found that federal IT executives believe Big Data could help agencies save more than $500 billion while also fulfilling mission objectives.)
Custom-developed Big Data tools are also enabling agencies to address their need to analyze data. For instance, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Computational Data Analytics Group has made its Piranha data analytics system available to other agencies. This system has helped medical researchers identify links that can alert doctors to aortic aneurysms before they occur. It is also used for more routine tasks, such as sifting through resumes to connect job candidates with hiring managers.
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