From: FCW

By Frank Konkel

Big data has all the promise in the world to help agencies glean otherwise impossible insights from massive repositories of data, but some believe federal policies thus far have blunted big data’s potential in the public sector.

“Policy questions are always a potential derailer,” said Josh Sullivan, a data scientist and vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton.

“We’ve worked with a number of big agencies on practical pilots and nationally enterprised adoptions,” Sullivan told FCW. “Inevitably, security policy, data protection policies and sharing policies were all antibodies to all the technology.”

Sullivan said that some intelligence agencies have exceled out of necessity at finding innovative solutions in big data that navigate policy, developing mature big data models that combine IT efficiencies, “smart” data and cloud analytics to create a portfolio on which data-driven decisions are made.

But most other federal agencies, Sullivan said, are content to reach the point at which they’ve jumped into the cloud and virtualized some of their IT infrastructure.

They are reacting to the big data buzz with outdated, old-hat polices rather than proactively embracing potentially huge financial gains and insights through policy that outlines questions that big data can actually answer.

“Until people start saying big analytics instead of big data, I don’t know if we’ll see the government realizing all the latent patterns there for us to discover,” Sullivan said. Agency executives can start framing outlines by “writing down 10 game-changing questions you cannot answer today that would substantially move the needle on your mission,” he added.

Technology changes fast, said Mark Forman, former administrator for e-government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget, but said broader federal polices aren’t changing with them.

“Laws relating to privacy haven’t kept up with the changes in data as a result of social media and the Internet,” said Forman, who believes decision makers will one day base major decisions on insights from structured and unstructured big data.

Forman said the Privacy Act, enacted in 1974 to keep the government from using personal citizen data for reasons not in the public’s best interest, could stand a 21st century refresh.

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