Recently, our chief data and analytics officer, Alan Jacobson, sat down with John Gilroy of Federal News Network to discuss emerging trends in federal data analytics. Here, you can find three key insights from the conversation.
1. We’re at a place where anybody can solve data and analytics problems, no matter how big or small.
“There’s a lot to being able to do powerful analytics with data. And certainly the first step is the management of it, getting your hands on it, being able to find it. Data is exploding at an incredible rate — 2.5 billion gigabytes of data per day coming into existence. By having at your fingertips the incredible power of the desktop computer today, along with the data that’s now available all over the world and advanced analytic tools to be able to process the data, you can really do spectacular things.”
2. There’s a lot more involved beyond simply gathering data together to get real transformation to happen.
“I was just recently talking with a colleague who was working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and looking at the Avian flu outbreak. The speed of analytics and the ability to provide data out into the field helped reduce the speed at which it was spreading.”
“Also, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have taken data from (hurricanes) Katrina and Irma and by blending data and doing geospatial analysis, they were able to speed up the aid to hundreds of thousands of people. That’s real transformation. Not just simply wrangling the data, but providing solutions, actionable insights that can be leveraged.”
3. Domain expertise allows you to ask the right questions in the beginning.
“Being able to process HR data and the ability to process legal data is very similar. This gets to why self‑service becomes really important, and that is, the expertise of those domains is really the differentiator. To be able to get great outcomes, it’s not simply being able to understand the math. It’s being able to understand the complex and the business. Taking a platform that’s applicable across all the domains and combining it with the domain expertise of today’s knowledge worker is where the magic happens.”
Stay PUT.
Get the full interview here.