WashingtonExec 2013 Government Contracting Outlook Series:
The new year brings big changes for the Federal IT industry, and WashingtonExec is back with its Government Contracting Industry Outlook Series.
We are giving local executives the opportunity to share their thoughts on where they see our industry headed this year and beyond. Leaders were asked a series of questions focused on cloud computing, healthcare IT, defense, mobility, and more.
Today’s featured exec is Ed Granstedt, Vice President of Program Development at Goldbot:
“We are seeing a global transformation of political, business and personal landscapes driven by ready access to, and need for, information and its subsequent influence and utility. The confluence of the cloud, big data, mobility, and social media are the accelerants. We are living in the age of “infofluence” and “infovantage”. This is evidenced through the events of the recent Arab Spring, or the global competitive shifts now occurring in manufacturing to ubiquitous tweet analytics on every issue, on every show, on every channel. We have advanced from using data to gain insight into past events to providing up to the minute understanding of the here and now in a very personal way: from real-time customer purchase decisions, to breaking global crises. We are now at the threshold of using Big Data to predict what is about to happen, enabling one to get ahead of what is happening. This is the ultimate competitive advantage.
This advantage though, requires a capable ”infostructure”, one that can provide the foundation for both public and private sectors. It encompasses organizations, platforms, and data sources. The variety of systems and sources of data in various info-spheres that in aggregate create the ‘big data’ set is vast – so vast, in fact, that it spans both the entirety of private enterprise as well as governmental enterprise. In other words it has transformed the landscape into a public commons challenge. In this vein, as with other common goods, it can create a national advantage on the global stage. This is the upcoming collaborative challenge for government and industry, to shape the very essence of our infostructure fabric that promotes this advantage for both public and private sectors while preserving privacy and property rights.”
