In the early 2000s, the manager of the Oakland Athletics began using players’ performance data to build a better baseball team. Chris Curry, Director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues at the GAO, believes that the government should do the same. His GAO report, titled “Federal Emergency Management Agency: Additional Planning and Data Collection CouldRead… Read more »
This blog post is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent guide, the Open Data Playbook for Government. Download the full guide here. What separates good data from bad data? Well, a couple of things: How the data is displayed, its accuracy, and useful context about the data are all key. Whether we know it or not,Read… Read more »
“It comes from everywhere. It knows all. … [It] lives in the cloud. It knows what we do.” That’s how big data is described in a “Dilbert” comic strip. While that might sound funny, it’s true that while everyone talks about big data, many people don’t know what it is or does. But it’s actuallyRead… Read more »
In the Next Generation of Government Training Summit session, “Analyzing Data to Make Better Decisions,” Kirsten Dalboe, MGMT Cube Program Manager at DHS, and Gray Brooks, Senior API Strategist at GSA, shared their successes with using data to improve performance and efficiency. Kirsten was the “data scientist” behind the DHS Management Cube, which integrates financial,Read… Read more »
In the wake of Katherine Archuleta’s departure as Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), it’s natural to think back on other high-profile federal leadership resignations. Some resigned from government because they did something wrong or poorly handled a key situation. Others left because, ultimately, they were the ones in charge. As Steve Huffman, co-founder and new CEORead… Read more »
Last week, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that “sensitive information” on 21.5 million personnel was stolen from their systems. Today, OPM announced additional information about the recent cyber incident Learn more: http://t.co/YrWkqJKyYO. pic.twitter.com/46pLmaWMxJ — Beth Cobert (@CobertFormerOPM) July 9, 2015 Soon after this “enormous breach” (so said FBI director James Comey) was announced, OPMRead… Read more »
Database guru and 2014 Turing Award winner Dr. Michael Stonebraker is not a big fan of MapReduce. Or so we can readily surmise, based on some of the comments he made (together with co-author David DeWitt, another highly acclaimed database researcher) in a blog post in early 2008. He and DeWitt called Mapreduce a “giantRead… Read more »
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 »
Time keeps on slippin’…at least that’s how it feels when you look at how fast technology is advancing. The speed at which the private sector is developing and implementing new technology has left government agencies like the Department of Defense scrambling to keep pace. In the recently released GovLoop guide, “The DoD of Tomorrow,” weRead… Read more »
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 »