Technological advancements and the exponential growth of information are reshaping business operations across numerous sectors, including the public sector. Government agencies are generating and archiving digital records at an accelerating pace, driven by the proliferation of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals. As digital information becomes more voluminous and complex, the challenges associated with information management, processing, storage, security, and retention intensify. Emerging tools for capture, search, discovery, and analysis are enabling organizations to extract valuable insights from unstructured data. The government sector has reached a critical juncture where leaders recognize information as 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, they are laying the groundwork to correlate dependencies across events, people, processes, and information.
High-value government solutions are being created through the integration of disruptive technologies:
- Mobile devices and applications
- Cloud services
- Social business technologies and networking
- Big Data and analytics
Big Data serves as an intelligent industry solution, enabling governments 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 more than just accumulating massive amounts 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," wrote 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 advanced this effort by establishing the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative in 2012. This initiative allocated over $200 million to maximize the potential of Big Data and the tools required to analyze it.
The challenges posed by Big Data are nearly as formidable as its promise is encouraging. Efficiently storing data is one significant challenge. With budgets remaining tight, agencies must minimize the cost per megabyte of storage while ensuring data remains easily accessible so users can retrieve it efficiently. The need to back up massive amounts of data further exacerbates this challenge.
Effectively analyzing data presents another major hurdle. Many agencies utilize commercial tools to sift through large datasets, identifying trends that improve operational efficiency. (A recent MeriTalk study found 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 helping agencies meet their data analysis 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 identify links that can alert doctors to aortic aneurysms before they occur. It is also used for routine tasks, such as sifting through resumes to match job candidates with hiring managers.
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