Technological advancements and the exponential growth of data are reshaping business operations across various sectors, including the public sector. Government entities are generating and digitizing information at unprecedented rates, driven by the proliferation of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing digital portals. As digital information becomes more expansive and complex, the management, processing, storage, security, and disposition of this data grow increasingly intricate. New tools for capture, search, discovery, and analysis are enabling organizations to extract valuable insights from their unstructured data. The government sector is reaching a critical threshold, recognizing that information is a strategic asset. To better serve citizens and meet mission requirements, governments must protect, leverage, and analyze both structured and unstructured information. As government leaders work to evolve into data-driven organizations capable of achieving their missions, they are establishing the foundations to correlate dependencies across events, people, processes, and information.
High-value government solutions will emerge from the integration 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 represents an intelligent industry solution that empowers governments to make better decisions by acting on patterns revealed through the analysis of large volumes of data—encompassing both related and unrelated, structured and unstructured sources.
However, achieving these outcomes requires more than just 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," noted 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 significant steps to assist agencies in finding these technologies by establishing the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative in 2012. This initiative allocated over $200 million to maximize the potential of the Big Data explosion and the tools necessary to analyze it.
The challenges posed by Big Data are nearly as formidable as its promise is encouraging. Efficient data storage remains a key challenge. With budgets often tight, agencies must minimize the per-megabyte cost of storage while ensuring data remains easily accessible for users to retrieve when and how they need it. Backing up massive quantities of data further intensifies this challenge.
Effective data analysis presents another major hurdle. Many agencies utilize commercial tools to sift through vast amounts of data, identifying trends that enhance operational efficiency. (A recent study by MeriTalk revealed 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 meet their analytical needs. For instance, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Computational Data Analytics Group has made its Piranha data analytics system available to other agencies. This system has assisted medical researchers in identifying links that can alert doctors to aortic aneurysms before they occur. It is also employed for routine tasks, such as screening resumes to connect job candidates with hiring managers.
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