We have all run into the office cliché similar to the saying “if all you use is a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Another way of saying this is that if all you see are nails, anything looks like a hammer. In both cases, the focus of misunderstanding is based on overlooking the particularsRead… Read more »
This is an excerpt from our recent industry perspective, How Unified Data Architecture Can Revolutionize Analytics in Government. To read the full thing, head here. To see what a UDA can do to elevate business performance, look no further than the transportation industry. The airlines were one of the first to tackle the concept of growingRead… Read more »
Federal HR professionals with access to electronic employee databases typically have access to a wealth of so-called “structured” employee data, or information that can be quickly counted and analyzed in spreadsheet programs to create pivot tables and reports. Examples of structured HR data include employee salary and demographic information and employee survey responses, all ofRead… Read more »
Excelling is often defined as going above and beyond what’s expected. So in its very nature, achieving excellence is not something that should come easily. In government contracting, excelling is not something that’s common sense. It’s a complex task, and it takes teamwork and collaboration for government workers to understand the best ways of goingRead… Read more »
For decades, OMB and Departments have been trying to trace federal grants and loans to specific places: cities, neighborhoods, farms, enterprise zones, individual houses or stores. The complexity of community development, economic development, rural development, job creation, or just accounting have plagued how funds can be traced. The purpose of tracing the money is toRead… Read more »
This is a salute to my brethren from the liberal arts, but also anyone who has ever thought English composition class was useless. What is it about understanding how writing happens that is so boring even if writing itself is fun, especially if you have only 140 characters and are not bound by spelling orRead… Read more »
After millennia, now most people are drawn to “GPS,” or “Google Maps,” and rely on navigation to drive, to hike, to find a restaurant, to catch fish, and more. Such interest and dependence on geospatial information systems’ data creates a neologism of “a Google Map” or a “GPS Map,” but neither are maps as weRead… Read more »
Capturing the value of ‘Big Data’ has emerged through the alliterative measures of “v.’ The growth of “v’s” usually has applied to “Big Data” but applies to all data. As in cosmology, questions arise how big “Big Data” is and can there be a limit to how much it can expand. So far, the gravityRead… Read more »
The world is awash with new health technologies – Fit Bits, iPhone apps, nutrition trackers, heart rate monitors. Even healthcare, one of the most slow-moving, risk-averse sectors, is starting to see the potential of using data to improve outcomes. The government has begun to understand the advantages to digitizing health records, and to implement programsRead… Read more »
If evidence-based decision-making is all the rage in government these days, how do agencies develop the skills to conduct such analyses? And how do agencies create a culture to support this management approach so it isn’t just another flavor-of-the-month fad? New Jersey’s child welfare system may have cracked the code. A new report for theRead… Read more »