How Government Can Start Predicting the Future

Every minute, 350,000 tweets are tweeted, 2.5 million Google searches are completed and 200 million emails are sent. All these actions contribute to the estimated 4 zettabytes, or 4 billion terabytes, of data existing today—a quantity that’s expected to increase to 35 zettabytes of data by 2020. That’s a nine-fold increase in existing data in just six years.

To put it simply: There’s a lot of data out there. And in order to parse that data, you have to understand that it exists in many different forms. Data can be thought of as falling into one of two categories: systems of record or systems of engagement.

Systems of record are designed around databases that collect and store specific pieces of information on specific environments or processes. Census records, the information that goes into the five day forecast, data on how much electricity your agency has used for the month—these all fall under the umbrella known as systems of record.

Systems of engagement, on the other hand, are ways in which people can engage with one another using the computer. Social media—such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn—would all be classified as systems of engagement. So would email, instant messaging programs and other solutions that facilitate communication—be it internal to an agency or a way for citizens to engage directly with the government.

“Things like social media are a different animal than systems of record,” said Scott Gaydos, Chief Technologist, US Public Sector at HP Enterprise Services. “They are a completely different way for employees and citizens to interact with the services that a particular government agency is building. Building purpose-built systems of engagement rather than systems of record is creating a new style of IT.”

But with so much data out there, figuring out how to utilize these two systems to best serve your organization can be tricky.

“When you take these things together—combining all of these massive influxes of new data with different kinds of systems of record and systems of engagement—it begets huge research challenges,” Gaydos said.

To optimize data’s impact, it is critical to remember that these two systems, while separate and distinct, need to work together. To fully leverage the potential benefits of data for the federal enterprise, it’s important to be clear about the question you’re seeking to answer through data and the outcomes it can help bring about. Through clear, purpose-driven data, agencies can not only understand their present but begin to predict their future.

To illustrate why the marriage of systems or record and systems of engagement are critical to a more proactive government, Gaydos points to the FDA’s August 2014 recall of peanut butter products across the country.

“There are lots of systems of record out there that inform the decision to enact a recall,” Gaydos said. “But what about systems of engagement like twitter? Around the time of the recall, we hypothesized that maybe we could use systems of engagement to find out if people are saying various phrases—phrases like ‘I don’t feel well’ or ‘I’m sick’—and correlating those tweets with recall activity.”

When the FDA analyzed the data, they found that there was an intriguing correlation between people talking about feeling sick and where recall activity was occurring. And, while this analysis occurred retrospectively, it has critical implications for the future and demonstrates ways government can cross reference systems of engagement with systems of record to yield unique, predictive methods of better ensuring the health and safety of its citizens.

“The crucial question here is can we use these tools together to become proactive and even predictive?” asked Gaydos. “Can we look at history to predict what we might want to do in the future?”

While the term systems of record may, on paper, read like “systems of old,” they’re anything but. Likewise, systems of engagement are not simply new tools for interaction, but also a way to fuel forward-thinking analysis. The ability of governments to become proactive, even predictive, is to bring all the data to the table. By applying a big data mindset, and the ability to detect patterns and trends, there’s no stopping the innovative ways government will find to better serve citizens.

About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. With the broadest technology portfolio spanning services, IT infrastructure, software, personal systems and printing, HP delivers solutions for customers’ most complex challenges. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at hp.com/gov/transformation.

This content is made possible by HP; it is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of GovExec's editorial staff.