Advances in technology and the exponential growth of information are reshaping business operations across various sectors, including the government. The generation of government data and the pace of digital archiving are accelerating, driven by the proliferation of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals. As digital information expands and grows more complex, the management, processing, storage, security, and disposition of this data become increasingly challenging. 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 that information is a strategic asset. Governments must now protect, leverage, and analyze both structured and unstructured information to better serve the public and fulfill mission requirements. As government leaders work to evolve their organizations into data-driven entities to successfully achieve their missions, they are establishing the foundation to correlate dependencies across events, personnel, processes, and information.
High-value government solutions will emerge from a convergence of the most disruptive technologies:
- Mobile devices and applications
- Cloud services
- Social business technologies and networking
- Big Data and analytics
Big Data represents one of the intelligent industry solutions, enabling government entities to make better decisions by taking action based on patterns revealed through the analysis of large volumes of data—whether related or unrelated, structured or unstructured.
However, achieving these objectives 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 assisting 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 required to analyze it.
The challenges posed by Big Data are nearly as daunting as the promise it offers is encouraging. Efficient data storage is one such challenge. As budgets remain tight, agencies must minimize the per-megabyte cost of storage while keeping data easily accessible so users can retrieve it whenever and however they need it. Backing up massive amounts of data further complicates this challenge.
Effective data analysis is another major hurdle. Many agencies utilize commercial tools that allow them to sift through vast amounts of data, identifying trends that enhance operational efficiency. (A recent study by MeriTalk 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 enabling agencies to meet the need for data analysis. 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 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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