Analytics

Cutting Costs by Building Energy Efficiency

We hear it every day: Government needs to cut costs. But how? If government is going to continue serving the public, there are certain things like workforce, infrastructure, and technology that must receive funding. Instead of cutting vital assets, we must instead seek efficiencies. According to IBM, a primary focus area should be how weRead… Read more »

STEM vs Humanities: Why Both are Needed for Analytics

A national conversation is continuing to brew over whether Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills should be emphasized in schools and universities over humanities and liberal arts education. Several recent studies have found that the perceived higher marketplace value of STEM skills has led to a drop in the percentage of students pursuing humanitiesRead… Read more »

Optimizing Mission Performance with Application Rationalization

This interview is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent guide, The DoD of Tomorrow, which explores how the department is transforming its operations, technology, workforce, and acquisitions process to confront 21st century challenges. Over the years, organizations often acquire numerous applications with the objective of improving operational efficiency. However, when those same applications then become obsoleteRead… Read more »

One Size Fits None – Are the Database Elephants Toast?

This past March, the Association for Computing Machinery announced that its 2014 Turing Award would go to Dr. Michael Stonebraker. As a Google V.P. put it (Google puts up the $1M cash prize that goes with the award), “The efficient and effective management of Big Data is crucial to our 21st century global economy …Read… Read more »

Your People Analytics Dashboard is Not Nearly as Useful as it Could Be

People are much more likely to retain information – and become intrigued by it, by listening to an interesting story than by listening to recitation of points on a slide. We’re more likely to retain information, learn from it and be able to act on it if it contains up-to-the-minute data. And we’re more likely… Read more »

Google: Solving Big Data – Sharing Technology and the Value

One of the many challenges involved in architecting “Big Data” solutions is in just moving the stuff around. Sometimes it makes sense to move the work to the Data (instead of the other way around). This assumes that your Data is already in a form that is amenable to heavy-duty analytics. More typically, you’re lookingRead… Read more »

A Customer’s View on How Data Dashboards Enhance Decision-Making

Data visualization software can help data analysts more efficiently distill and communicate pertinent information to their customers. Likewise, the customization available in many data visualization packages enables consumers of data to more easily obtain and sort through the information they need. In a previous blog post, I explored how the U.S. General Services Administration isRead… Read more »

5 Cool Federal Dashboards (and 2 Awesome Agency Ones)

In December 2009, the Open Government Directive established deadlines for federal agencies to make quality information available to the public, all in the name of greater transparency. Recovery.gov was one of the leaders of this open government charge, and was actually established in February 2009, ahead of the directive. Today, there are a number ofRead… Read more »