The IRS, FEMA and a growing number of other federal agencies are turning the art of analytics into an increasingly powerful workplace discipline that is helping agencies and their employees improve their collective performance. Keep reading →
big data
People, Products, Petabytes: Increasing Efficiencies In Supply Chains
By John Goodman and Jeff Scott Miller
Getting better performance out of supply chain and operations activities is not at the top of everyone’s priority list, but it should be. In today’s world, moving things smartly and efficiently – regardless of whether they are people, product or petabytes – is paramount to success.
This challenge is not a new one. But, the pressures of meeting customer demands, fulfilling their mission requirements, and maintaining high service levels is significantly complicated at a time of diminishing budgets. Even though government organizations recognize the importance of making their operations more efficient, leaders must prove the benefit of the change before investing time, people, and money in system and process improvements. Keep reading →
Big data can drive big capabilities. But it takes day-to-day practices that can help build and sustain an analytics culture.
A report released today by the Partnership for Public Service aims to educate federal managers on how agencies can do just that. The report, From Data to Decisions II: Building an Analytics Culture, examines how to best use data – not anecdotes – to base decisions. Keep reading →
One of the best presentations at the recent Big Data Innovation Summit in Boston was by LinkedIn Senior Data Scientist Yael Garten. Garten, who leads LinkedIn’s Mobile Data Analytics team, in a presentation entitled Data Infused Product Design & Insights at LinkedIn provided a glimpse of how big data is used by LinkedIn to explore usage patterns, on mobile devices, for instance.
This is a challenge facing the US Government in the new Digital Government Strategy: namely delivering existing web sites and database information — and eventually the types of big data results that the intelligence and scientific communities have — so that mobile devices can access that information from supercomputers.
For those who haven’t kept up with LinkedIn’s progress of late: It’s mission is to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” Here are a few facts at glance, from Garten’s presentation: Keep reading →
Big data, which has been the hot topic for conferences this year, has also received a good deal of attention on Capitol Hill in recent weeks, most notably with two recent events:
- The ACT-IAC discussion with Congressional staff members on Big Data at the Hill – Defining and Understanding Policy Implications
- The TechAmerica Foundation’s release of its Big Data Commission report, “Demystifying Big Data: A Practical Guide to Transforming the Business of Government,” “roadmap to using big data to better serve the American people.”
As one who represents a population of data scientists, a group for which the TechAmerica says there is growing demand, I have seen quite a few–and written a number of–articles about recent big data conferences:
- Predictive Analytics World for Government
- Linkedin Provides Big Data Results on Growing and Shrinking Industries for White House
- Big Data Innovation
- Big Data: Volume and Value Really Matter
- Big Data Systems First Need Data Science and Knowledge Bases and Not Ontologies
- Challenges and Opportunities in Big Data
- Intelligence Community Loves Big Data
- Data Evolution in the Government Enterprise: Will It Still Be Big Data Next Year?
- The Value Potential of Big Data to Government: Parsing and serving it up “small”
What Congress should do to help big data Keep reading →
This is the first in a series of stories about innovation at the National Weather Service.
The National Weather Service is on a hunt for killer tornadoes, using the latest technology to warn people sooner and creating a model that could be used by other agencies to make predictions on everything from health to the economy. Keep reading →
In this video, Tiffany Shlain, founder of The Webby Awards, Jeff Jonas, of IBM, and Mari Maeda, of DARPA, discuss ways data can change the world.
It was taken at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Information 2012 event in San Francisco, California. The session was moderated by Kenneth Cukier, data editor for The Economist. Keep reading →
Most government agencies strive to use technology more effectively, but only a few use it to directly save lives.
Despite its small size, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization comes up with techniques and technologies to get rid of bombs and shares that information with U.S. and allied warfighters through an online training portal. Keep reading →
A group of technology leaders came to the Capitol this week to make the case that the age of “big data” is not only upon us, but also represents a powerful and practical way for federal agencies to create substantially more value for the public – for relatively little incremental investment.
That comes as refreshing news compared to the relentless promises of big savings that accompanied the dawn of cloud computing, which has proven far trickier to implement. The difference is due in large measure to the fact that big data is really more of a phenomenon than a technology. Keep reading →
NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy launched a new public challenge contest Wednesday to generate novel approaches to using “big data” information sets from various U.S. government agencies.
Dr. Suzanne Iacono, senior science advisor for the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science directorate, made the announcement during an industry forum at the Capitol surrounding the release of a new report on big data in government. Keep reading →