Government

The use and adoption of big data within governmental processes is beneficial and allows efficiencies in terms of cost, productivity, and innovation, but does not come without its flaws. Data analysis often requires multiple parts of government (central and local) to work in collaboration and create new and innovative processes to deliver the desired outcome. Below are the thought leading examples within the governmental big data space.


United States of America
  • In 2012, the Obama administration announced the Big Data Research and Development Initiative, to explore how big data could be used to address important problems faced by the government. The initiative is composed of 84 different big data programs spread across six departments.
  • Big data analysis played a large role in Barack Obama‘s successful 2012 re-election campaign.
  • The United States Federal Government owns six of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world.
  • The Utah Data Center has been constructed by the United States National Security Agency. When finished, the facility will be able to handle a large amount of information collected by the NSA over the Internet. The exact amount of storage space is unknown, but more recent sources claim it will be on the order of a few exabytes.