Federal CIOs face many challenges processing petabytes of knowledge. But progressively more analytic tools offer new insights to enhance agency services with constituents.

Every minute of each day, enterprises are flooded with digital data from email, social media sites, websites, and mobile apps. As an enterprise, the government is not any different.

Federal agencies and other large organizations are already confronting the necessity to handle petabytes of information. All this data will stress an already overwhelmed system, nevertheless it may even create opportunities for greater engagement — citizen engagement, primarily. So as to require the government to rethink a number of its digital strategies.

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Many federal agencies have began to use mobile technology, social networks, and context-based services to create channels of communication, but these tools is probably not implemented in a method that meets the goal of effective interaction with citizens. By treating constituents more like consumers and customers, the government can move beyond digital marketing and e-commerce and make the most of one of the vital promising trends occurring in big data.

Design for analytics
Right now, technology is not any longer the barrier to gathering information. But new applications have to be designed to assemble the proper information. Which means asking questions on the issues you wish to solve, after which building programs to gather the info.

Consider UPS, which installed hand-held computers and in-vehicle sensors to trace package and truck movement. From this information, the corporate determined that making left-hand turns slowed delivery and added to fuel costs. The choice? Change the routes to minimize left-hand turns.

Similarly, federal agencies ought to rethink how they design software, going beyond basic functionality to elicit data-rich answers that solve key business questions. On this way, federal CIOs can transition into business drivers and strategic partners for his or her agencies. The implications? Better data analysis is resulting in better outcomes for his or her customers, or rather constituents.

We’re already seeing several federal agencies taking steps to enhance their responses to their constituents in line with many of the work we’re doing with them. FEMA’s National Integration Center, for example, is developing an analytics dashboard to be able to integrate geospatially-based data, including data from mobile applications. This dashboard, fed with real-time, on-the-ground information, can help emergency planners predict the impact of hazards.

The Veterans Benefits Administration, meanwhile, is implementing advanced analytics to assist detect and forestall instances of fraud. These predictive analytics will make sure the funds are spent appropriately and for his or her intended purpose.

Increase data velocity
Not only is far more data being collected, however it can be being analyzed faster than ever before. The desire for greater data velocity, or the flexibility to show data into insights quickly, has exploded. That has also brought about a surge in new technologies to investigate data. It’s now possible to scan tens of billions of records a second. Put in a different way, these new programs can query terabytes in lower than a second.

For the government, this increased data velocity not just gives agency executives the risk to behave quickly, but in addition creates the imperative to take action.

But what does this mean for citizen engagement? Constituents are consumers, too, and so they increasingly expect near-real time access to data in all in their interactions. Consider a constituent who types in his address and other information into an agency website, expecting to access additional info specific to his or her needs. If the individual would not get a response to the query quickly, he’s going to likely try yet another method.

To increase citizen engagement, then, the government must make sense of the info as fast as possible, to produce new insights and higher engagement with constituents.

Move beyond the cloud
Cloud-based technologies continue to remodel organizations due to ability to store quite a lot of data and big programs. Although an increasing number of businesses are profiting from cloud services, the choices about when to take advantage of public cloud services are becoming more nuanced — and more important.

Clearly, the movement in cloud-like applications is encouraging. The National Science Foundation recently launched into a project to modernize its 25-year-old financial accounting system to a cloud-based economic system. By improving its efficiency and effectiveness, the NSF would be better ready to deliver on its mission of selling scientific research nationwide.

For most federal organizations, the conventional approaches to enterprise architecture might want to change. Cloud-as-a-service models are changing the way in which technology is consumed, integrated, orchestrated, and secured, thus bringing new how to add value. Cloud is how agencies will power future innovations. The most important hurdle CIOs and federal agencies face today is the willingness to embrace the technology.

Better personal interactions, too
The promise of the digital future is giving option to greater interaction and engagement, that’s true for giant and small companies, and for the government. Improved analytics, driven by the potential to gather more data and analyze it faster, is driving this revolution. Here is true for firms and for big enterprises, including the government.

Going forward, the government must recognize that its constituents’ expectations are being shaped by the experiences they have got within the commercial world and view improving its infrastructure to permit for better online interactions. Doing so will improve not only the net interactions. By maintaining integrated communications across both physical and virtual channels, agencies may expect to exploit the insights gained from digital channels to enhance service when personal interactions are necessary besides.

Tom Greiner is technology lead for Accenture Federal Services.

Moving email to the cloud has lowered IT costs and improved efficiency. Discover what federal agencies can learn from early adopters. Also within the The nice Email Migration issue of InformationWeek Government: Lessons from a successful government data site. (Free registration required.)

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