Decades ago, system administrators would dream about having the storage we have today. Very few considered the ramifications of controlling and allowing access to petabytes of data that were increasing every day.
This is an interview with several experts from federal and state organizations who share challenges in handling large amounts of data whose access must be carefully managed. Considerations include compliance, retention, and making sure the data is accurate.
One concept discussed is data sharing. Jennifer Coester from the State of Delaware talks about groups who all agree that data must be shared between departments. The caveat is that they want access to other information but want to restrict access to theirs. Perhaps this is not a technical issue, but a concept that should be handled in management.
Administrative aspects of managing data were reflected in comments from David Sanchez from the Air Force. He handles completely different kinds of information and data. He observes that military organizations are so structured that initiatives from a high level may take time to trickle down to lower-level areas.
As an example, he cites policies for giving access to data. One size does not fit all. Policies for accessing nuclear data certainly vary from policies that involve medical information. Each functional area must have its own policies.
Medicare, Medicaid, and healthcare.gov each have tremendous amounts of information, with each category subject to specific legal limits to access. George Linares from the CMS shares with listeners how they have successfully been able to tag data by domains.
He does warn that just because you have figured out how to manage the existing system does not mean that you will not have challenges. There is a new federal initiative to examine health care from an equity perspective. Data scientists must be able to go back to existing systems and pull up pertinent information that will assist in evaluating new topics like this.
To view this webinar: Fueling Data-Driven Digital Government.
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