Final Preparations For The 4 April 2013 Government Big Data Forum

By Bob Gourley

The 4 April 2013 Government Big Data Forum is shaping up to be an absolutely incredible event, especially if you are a government professional seeking ways to make sense over data to better serve your organization’s mission. The event will also be great for the IT community that serves and supports the government.

If you have not registered do so immediately, like as soon as you read this. Sign up at: http://j.mp/XLK9kY

If you have already registered, there are a few other things we would really appreciate you doing. Please consider the following:

1) Review the agenda in advance, including the list of keynote presenters. I have spoken to each of the keynote presenters and most of the panelists and I know for a fact you will be blown away by the incredible presentations they are planning. But each promises to leave plenty of time for questions and answers and will be running very interactive sessions. So come with questions. If you would like to submit questions to speakers in advance you can do so using the form below. If you leave contact info and your question can not be addressed we will get to the speaker and get a response to you as soon as we can. But this is totally optional. You may always formulate your questions after hearing what the speakers say.

Speakers are:

Kirit Amin
Deputy CIO and Chief Technology Officer
US Department of Commerce

Kirit Amin was named the U.S. Department of Commerce, Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, in November 2012.

Shawn Kingsberry
Assistant Director of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board

Shawn Kingsberry is the Assistant Director of Technology and the Chief Information Officer for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.

Donna Roy
Executive Director, Information Sharing Environment
Office of the CIO, Department of Homeland Security

Donna Roy joined the DHS in December of 2006 and currently serves as the CIO’s Executive for Information Sharing.

Plus stalwarts of the community from: NGA, NSA, CIA, CBP, DoD and the US Army.

2) Review how Big Data is defined. I think we all owe a big det to Doug Laney for helping the community get their arms around a simple definition. Here is a favored way of putting it that flows from Doug’s initial work:

Big Data: A phenomenon defined by the rapid acceleration in the expanding volume of high velocity, complex and diverse types of data. Big Data is often defined along three dimensions– volume, velocity and variety.

Big Data Solutions: Advanced techniques and technologies to enable the capture, storage, distribution, management and analysis of information.

3) For context, please review this post by Doug Cutting, the man who in many ways made this entire movement possible by helping convert concept papers provided by Google into Hadoop and then helping steward an open source approach to turning Hadoop into a framework of useful capabilities. Doug’s post, titled “Seven Thoughts on Hadoop’s Seventh Birthday“, may help shape dialog in the event as we think through government mission needs, gaps, lessons learned and potential future solutions.

4) Consider the great firms that will be at this event and think through in advance what their capability might do for your mission if you are in government or for your offerings if you are a system integrator. Many of these sponsoring firms will have demos up and running on an expo floor during the event so be sure to target the ones you are most interested in seeing. They include:

Cloudera, MarkLogic, Thetus, Datameer, IBM (Analyst Notebook), EMC, SAP, Recorded Future, Splunk, 10Gen, FlexAnalytics, Parabal, Optensity, VMware, Arista, VirtualInstruments, Qbase, Nutanix and Symantec