Big Data and Public Sector

In previous posts, we introduced several interesting big data applications in private sectors and the technologies behind big data. In the information era, facing large volume, high velocity and mixed variety of data, public sector organizations also realized the significance of big data analyzing capability for cost savings and efficiency improvement for their services to reach their goals.

Indeed, harnessing the power of big data technologies would offer enormous benefits to public sector. With big data technologies to track online forum and blog information, government ministry leaders can get more open feedback on their services and policies for improvement, make informed decisions and discover new services that they can provide, which they can hardly achieve through convention ways: this is especially beneficial to countries where citizens prefer online forum for expressing their opinions to traditional feedback channels, due to the political and social restrictions. Thus, big data provides assistance for government ministries to improve operation efficiency and transparency. McKinsey Global Institute’s research shows that big data technologies have the potential to reduce operation costs in Europe’s public sector by around 20%, which is about €300 billion every year [1]. Realizing the benefits, in Mar 2012, US government announced a Big Data initiative with 200 million budgets to improve the big data tools employed [1]. 

Public education institutions also embrace big data analytics to enhance customized e-learning experience for students. Since 2010, National University of Singapore (NUS) invested heavily in man-hours to analyze deeper into the huge amount of student data and hope to understand the user behaviors of its vibrant and diverse student population.  Nonetheless, this is an extremely labor intensive task. Its staff faced challenges in data mining and analyzing uncertainties of the data patterns found using traditional ways. In 2012, NUS deployed Microsoft big data software (SQL Server 2012 Cloud-ready platform) to capture real-time analytics from the campus net. With this solution, the staff can consolidate more accurate data sets and view them in an interactive graphical virtualization to obtain insights across their different level of operations. The data analysis process was claimed to speed up by 50% [2] so that the university can constantly improve their services to meet the need of its diverse groups of students. 

Besides cost reduction and efficiency improvement, big data also brings value to public organizations, especially government agencies, on fraud detection, treat identification and so on. With big data tools, they can track information much more easily to analyze abnormal activities of individual citizens to uncover or predict fraud and thread to society. Tax evasion may also be spot by tracking the social network media. 

Although big data tools deployment in public sector organizations has enormous benefits to fuel the service intelligence, it also has potential risks on which we have concerns. 

Those powerful tools may be misused by some public agency staff to breach the privacy of citizens. You will never know that you are being spied when you are taking to your loved ones. Hence, certain regulations are required to ensure proper usage of the big data tools and reach the original goals of cost savings and efficiency improvement for public sector organizations.

In the next post, we will discuss more on the risks of big data and application in insurance.

[1]  Big data: the next frontier for innovation, McKinsey Global Institute Report, 2011

[2] http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2013/mar/20/singapore-university-embraces-big-data-analytics