| By Bob Gourley |
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| November 13, 2012 10:44 AM EST |
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By BobGourley
The amount of data being created in governments is growing faster than humans can analyze. But analysis can solve tough challenges. Those two facts are driving the continual pursuit of new Big Data solutions. Big Data solutions are of particular importance in government. The government has special abilities to focus research in areas like Health Sciences, Economics, Law Enforcement, Defense, Geographic Studies, Environmental Studies, Bioinformatics, and Computer Security. Each of those area can be well served by Big Data approaches, and each has exemplars of solutions worthy of highlighting to the community.
The Government Big Data Solutions Award was established to help highlight some of the best innovation in the federal space. The 2012 award process solicited nominations from across federal, state and local governments. Nominations were evaluated based on how well submissions addressed three key factors:
- Focus on current solutions: The ability to make a difference in government missions in the very near term was the most important evaluation factor.
- Focus on government teams: Industry supporting government also considered, but this is about government missions.
- Consideration of new approaches: New business processes, techniques, tools, models for enhancing analysis are key.
Nominees were evaluated by a panel of judges that included: Doug Cutting of
Cloudera (creator of Hadoop), Alan Wade (former government CIO), Chris Dorobek (leading government journalist and publisher of the
DorobekInsider.com, and Ed Granstedt (industry leading federal sector technologist).
The judges selected five exemplars for recognition as the top five nominees for the 2012 award. They include:
- Veterans Health Administration: New Big Data approaches and frameworks provide data and tools for 20,000 clinicians to track medical trends, better anticipate outcomes. The scope of the data set is over 80 billion data files. Focused on service to 25 million veterans. Judges selected Veterans Health Administration because of the impact and best practices in Big Data solutions.
- NASA: Multiple and extensive activities. One of many exemplars was the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS). Their work includes scalable Hadoop clusters for large scale climate simulations.
- Bureau of Engraving and Printing: This government agency is the largest producer of security documents in country. They have fielded an Oracle based Big Data solution enhanced quality and mission support, reduced waste. Judges characterized this as a good match of right business processes to and a modern technical approach.
- AMSAA: Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity. Vehicle data analysis program instruments vehicles in theater to collect operational and environmental parameter historical data. Massive data pattern screening and analysis toolsets put in place. Result: rapid identification of issues before mission impact.
- National Cancer Institute: Extensive research and working prototypes of cutting edge systems based on Cloudera Distribution of Apache Hadoop (CDH) and the Oracle Big Data Appliance. Judges noted the significant potential impact of this solution as well as the strength of the technical approach.
Details on the judges top pick will be announced on 20 Nov 2012
Bob Gourley, former CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is Founder and CTO of Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and advisory firm providing fact based technology reviews in support of venture capital, private equity and emerging technology firms. He has extensive industry experience in intelligence and security and was awarded an intelligence community meritorious achievement award by AFCEA in 2008, and has also been recognized as an Infoworld Top 25 CTO and as one of the most fascinating communicators in Government IT by GovFresh.
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