IT decision makers working for the government overwhelmingly support the use of big data in the public sector, according to a report released by the TechAmerica Foundation and sponsored by software application company SAP.
The report was based on survey answers from 198 IT professionals within government agencies, approximately half of them in the federal sector and half in the state sector.
The term is used to describe the collection of data sets that are so large, they cannot be analyzed using traditional data management applications. The purported advantage is that very large data sets enable IT professionals to find more patterns in the data they collect.
According to the report, 82 percent of the IT decision makers said that the use of these data sets is “the way of the future.” In the same report, one chief information officer at a federal agency said, “Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly-used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time.”
One major draw of the use of very large data sets in government agencies is the potential to save money. The report showed that IT employees believe big data can save at least 10 percent of the annual federal budget, which adds up to a minimum of $380 billion. Eighty-three percent of the federal IT employees in the survey agreed with the 10 percent savings figure. Thirty percent of federal employees and 31 percent of state employees said the annual savings for their department would be more than 20 percent.
Many in the survey even claimed nationwide use of these very large data sets would benefit public safety and possibly save lives. Police departments, for instance, have used big data to find patterns in crime data to create preventative models to better use their resources.
One of the major challenges identified by public employees is the privacy concern. Forty-seven percent of federal employees cited privacy as a major issue, making it the chief concern of federal employees. Other barriers noted in the survey included the level of investment needed, lack of ownership of the data within each organization and higher priorities in other areas of the budget.
As the importance of big data gains support from IT professionals in a variety of fields, the demand will increase for workers who are trained in data analysis and business technology. New jobs will likely emerge in government agencies, as well as companies in the private sector that benefit from large-scale data analysis.
[cf]skyword_tracking_tag[/cf]
Please Leave A Comment
Related posts:
Commerce Department Releases Report on Benefits of Government Data
Data Management: IT Professionals Want Internal Cloud Solutions
Talend Survey on Big Data Advantages and Obstacles
Qapital Uses ‘If This Then That’ to Help Millennials Build Savings
Platfora Brings Visual Business Intelligence to Big Data
No Comment