Advancements in technology and the exponential growth of data are reshaping business operations across various sectors, including the public sector. Government data generation and digital archiving rates are accelerating due to the rapid proliferation of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals. As digital information expands and becomes more complex, the management, processing, storage, security, and disposition of this data also grow more intricate. New capture, search, discovery, and analysis tools are enabling organizations to extract valuable insights from unstructured data. The government sector is reaching a tipping point, recognizing information as a strategic asset that must be protected, leveraged, and analyzed—both structured and unstructured—to better serve missions and meet requirements. As government leaders strive to evolve into data-driven organizations, they are laying the groundwork to correlate dependencies across events, people, processes, and information.
High-value government solutions will emerge from a combination of 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 enables government entities to make better decisions by acting on patterns revealed through the analysis of large volumes of data—both related and unrelated, structured and unstructured.
However, achieving these goals requires far more than simply accumulating massive quantities of data. As Tom Kalil and Fen Zhao of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote on the OSTP Blog, "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."
In 2012, the White House took a significant step toward helping agencies identify these technologies by establishing the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative. This initiative allocated over $200 million to maximize the potential of the Big Data explosion and the tools needed to analyze it.
The challenges posed by Big Data are nearly as daunting as its promise is encouraging. Efficient data storage is one such challenge. With budgets always tight, agencies must minimize the per-megabyte cost 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 heightens this challenge.
Effective data analysis presents another major hurdle. Many agencies use commercial tools to sift through vast amounts of data, identifying trends that help them operate more efficiently. A recent study by MeriTalk revealed that federal IT executives believe Big Data could help agencies save over $500 billion while also fulfilling mission objectives.
Custom-developed Big Data tools are also allowing agencies to address 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 helped medical researchers find 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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