Transforming Federal Agencies: Data at the Core

Federal agencies need to realize value from their often-extensive data holdings. Powerful new tools are both providing answers to tough questions and solutions for complying with mandates using those data holdings.

Federal agencies are under mandates to improve decision-making, upgrade digital services, and make IT and other operations more efficient. Only a few years ago, the approach centered on big data, how to store and analyze datasets of unlimited size. IT practitioners pursued data lakes, Hadoop instances, and big data analytics; But the approach often failed to deliver the results agencies wanted, and ballooned storage costs and complexity. Agencies found they had abundant data, but not enough information to fulfill their mandates.

Now new thinking and new capabilities have emerged that make using data to derive real information straightforward and within reach. Information abundance—including from artificial intelligence applications—requires a fresh strategy based on three foundational capabilities.