Federal agencies are hard at work developing strategies to overcome data challenges and ensure they’re meeting critical mission needs, Federal data experts from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said during the Databricks Data and AI Summit 2022 in late June.
The rapid pace of technology evolution has created enormous volumes of data, which if used effectively can provide important insights to improve the Federal government’s overall performance. However, Federal agencies continue to struggle with deriving value from all that data.
“These challenges hinder their ability to extract any actionable insight,” said Howard Levenson, general manager for Databricks Federal.
From an industry perspective, Levenson explained that some of the most pressing issues agencies face include:
- Fragmented views of mission-critical data due to siloed information;
- Legacy systems that can’t scale for expanding data;
- Siloed data preventing opportunities for real-time data use; and
- A lack of tools available to transition from descriptive to predictive data analytics.
Federal data experts on stage with Levenson at the Databricks Data and AI Summit echoed his sentiments on those challenges, but also explained how they are moving to overcome them.