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.
Prem Jadwani, Senior Solutions Architect of Enterprise Solutions Group at GTSI, spoke with us about his predictions for 2013 below. We also had the chance to interview him along with GTSI CEO Sterling Phillips last year about TechAmerica’s Big Data Commission.
“I envision there will be a very strong collaboration between the industry and the government to address the challenges associated with Big Data. It requires coordinated action on the part of government (federal, state, and local) and the private sector. New forms of public-private partnerships are essential to meet the challenges posed by new technologies and non-traditional sources of data like sensor data and social networks. Most often, the private sector industry is at the forefront of innovation and the focus is on keeping the costs low and the value high.
There are many emerging technologies and best practices from the private industry that government agencies can leverage. For example, consider Hadoop – the most well-known technology in Big Data. Hadoop, which is now a mainstream technology for processing massive amounts of data in a scalable manner, was inspired originally from Google publications on MapReduce, GoogleFS and BigTable. Today Hadoop is not only being successfully used by the commercial companies like Yahoo and eBay, but also by several government agencies to positively influence the mission. State Department uses Hadoop technology to look for fraudulent visa and passport applications. The NSA has started using Hadoop for a massive, nationwide system for sharing and analyzing data. GSA operates USASearch, which uses Hadoop to host search services over more than 500 government sites effectively and economically.
· The government and private sector both need to work together more effectively. Last year, National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the award of $15 million in grant funding for eight big data projects. The agency hopes the awards will lead to new tools and methods for extracting knowledge from large data sets. We will see many other government agencies and DoD will continue investing in similar new opportunities for research and development with leading universities and private sector companies around big data applications like DNA sequencing, genetic research, intelligent video analytics, advanced cyber threat detection and others.
· In the next few years, agency spending on tactical deployments of big data will continue to grow laying the ground for long term pervasive deployments of big data solutions which will eventually help transform the government and society. To make data a strategic asset that can be used to better achieve mission outcomes, now is the time for agencies to start evolving their infrastructure to harness the power of big data and include big data in the strategic planning, enterprise architecture, and human capital of each agency.”
