Technological advancements and the exponential growth of information are reshaping business operations across various sectors, including the government sector. Government data generation and digital archiving are accelerating due to the surge in mobile devices and applications, smart sensors, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals. As digital information expands and grows in complexity, managing, processing, storing, securing, and disposing of this data becomes increasingly challenging. New tools for capturing, searching, discovering, and analyzing data 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 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 to successfully accomplish their missions, they are establishing the foundation to correlate dependencies across events, people, processes, and information.
High-impact government solutions will emerge from integrating 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 a key 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 from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in a post on the OSTP Blog.
The White House took 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 required to analyze it.
The challenges posed by Big Data are nearly as daunting as the promise it holds is encouraging. Efficiently storing data is one such challenge. With budgets always tight, agencies must minimize the per-megabyte cost of storage while ensuring data remains 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 challenge. Many agencies use commercial tools to sift through vast amounts of data, identifying trends that help them operate more efficiently. 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 enabling agencies to address 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 screening resumes to connect job candidates with hiring managers.
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