Executive Briefing Series:

DATA ANALYTICS

Sponsored by
 Data Analysis:
Refining ITs New Oil
Teradata Panel of Experts
Thomas Sasala, the chief data
officer of the Department of the
Army
 dward Kearns, Ph.D., the chief
E
data officer at the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration
Jodi Morton, vice president for
Single-Family Data Governance and
Management at Freddie Mac
Michael Peckham, the director of
the DATA Act Program Management
Office at the Health and Human
Services Department
Christina Ho, deputy assistant
secretary for accounting policy and
financial transparency at Treasury
David Kuenzel, the vice president
and general manager of Teradata
Government Systems, LLC
Alan Ford, Teradatas director of
government systems pre-sales
 r. Timothy Kropp, senior adviser
D
to the chief data officer in the HHS
Office of Inspector General
Kris Rowley, chief data officer of
the General Services Administration
Executive Briefing Series: Data Analytics
BY TOM TEMIN
F
or federal agencies, data has emerged
as a new kind of currency. Its not
that data itself is new, but rather
the nature and value of data has
changed. Where agencies once held data
only in highly structured databases tied to
specific applications, they now also have data
from many other sources and in a variety of
forms and formats. Network logs, sensors
in a variety of domains, social media, and
the various financial and human resource
systems within agencies are just a few of the
sources generating this data.
The resulting asset has various names data
holdings, data equities, for example. However,
like crude oil, datas value remains largely
potential unless agencies have strategies for
processing and analyzing it. SQL queries and
reports remain important tools, but they
dont work in mixed or unstructured data
environments. For greater scientific insight,
more efficient program management and
the development of digital services, agencies
need a 21st century data strategy.
To explore what these strategies might
look like and what tools they might require,
Federal News Radio convened a panel of
 federal data officers joined by a pair of
subject matter experts from a leading data
analytics tools vendor.
From the military side, Thomas Sasala, the
chief data officer of the Department of the
Army, says the Army maintains four major
portfolios of data, only one of which is
tactical. Yet all of the data stores can, in some
manner, contribute to the Armys knowledge
of its own readiness and where the gaps lie.
So his focus is on establishing a readiness
dashboard informed by all relevant data
sources.
For Edward Kearns, Ph.D., the chief
data officer at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the challenge is
making some 30 petabytes of public domain
data more accessible. Because of the volume
of data and other staff duties, this constitutes
a strain on resources.
The challenge for Jodi Morton, vice president
for Single-Family Data Governance and
Management at Freddie Mac, is embedding
a more data-oriented culture both in the IT
staff and in the lines of business owners,
such that they can realize the value of their
decisions based on data analytics. There is
a fair amount of activity in gathering and
sharing data, maintaining the corporate data
warehouse, and culling unneeded assets,
such as tables, no one uses anymore.
Executive Briefing Series: Data Analytics
In short, data really has become the crude
oil of IT. Properly refined it ensures no
manager needs ever make a decision in a
vacuum, said Michael Peckham, the director
of the DATA Act Program Management
Office at the Health and Human Services
Department.
For agencies, then, the next generation of
IT activity will include innovative ways of
obtaining greater value from the data they
have. Doing so will require a three-pronged
strategy:
1. Establishing a culture of data sharing
among components. If people arent
talking, you know the systems arent
talking, Peckham said. Also required
is some evangelism to help users
understand the data available to them,
and how they can pose new questions
about their work.
2. Reorienting data stores to optimize value
using data analytics. No single form of
storage, whether so-called data lakes,
warehouses, no SQL databases or fully
structured databases, will necessarily be
the one solution needed.
3. Installing an infrastructure of tools for
analyzing and visualizing data, so it
ultimately becomes useful.
 Data policies
Federal IT policy development over the
last several years has, in part, emphasized
open standards, data sharing and the use of
data to improve program management and
transparency.
An important example comes from the
Digital Accountability and Transparency
Act. It brings together many of the issues
surrounding the bigger data challenge.
Enacted in 2014, the DATA Act seeks to
make federal spending data available and
cogent by requiring agencies to report it
in a common format. The law charged the
Office of Management and Budget and the
Treasury Department with establishing
nonproprietary, searchable, and widely
accepted standards for spending data.
Christina Ho, deputy assistant secretary for
accounting policy and financial transparency
at Treasury, leads implementation of the
DATA Acts provisions on standards. Data
on $4 trillion in annual spending, she
said, resides in some 100 agencies, each
with multiple systems. She said that while
matching data formats sounds simple, the
complexity builds, thanks in part, to the
number of elements required to make sense
of federal spending.
We were able to develop industry-based,
integrated data standards that have
budget, accounting, procurement, financial
assistance, which includes loans, insurance,
and grants, Ho said. She added, Treasury
is seeding certain analytics products on a
public platform, because of the complexity of
Executive Briefing Series: Data Analytics
the relationships among the data sets, to help
potential users in agencies, Congress and
industry.
Its also important to manage the sheer
growth in data. David Kuenzel, the vice
president and general manager of Teradata
Government Systems, LLC, pointed to one
example: the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services (CMS). About a decade
ago, he said, the data in the Integrated
Data Repository(IDR) at CMS amounted
to about five terabytes. Today, the IDR has
grown to a high-end 1-petabyte system,
and is now integrated with a large Hadoop
system, thereby creating more holistic
analytical capabilities.
That volume also yields, with the right
analysis tools applied, patterns leading to
fraud discovery. The agency has recovered
billions under its Fraud Prevention Initiative,
Kuenzel said.
Kuenzel, and Alan Ford, Teradatas director
of government systems pre-sales, said federal
data officials are starting to rethink how they
manage data. Kuenzel said a growing number
of agencies have more than a petabyte of
data. The cool and new thing out now,
Kuenzel said, [is that for] some of the data
sets that arent necessarily new, now there
are technologies that can help agencies
leverage them and pull them into their
analytical ecosystem.
He added, agencies are still working to
integrate data sources using open source
tools into various settings, such as data lakes.
These tools are sometimes like a free puppy,
meaning the upfront capital costs are low, but
 they may come with significant integration
and lifecycle costs, and many times,
the Data Scientists required to leverage
these technologies are hard to find in the
marketplace. Recently, many agencies are
looking at ways to bring multiple data sets
into a more unified data architecture, where
these data sets can now easily integrate and
communicate with the more traditional data
sets sitting in data warehouse technology,
thereby offering up a more integrated
analytical ecosystem.
It turns out, Ford said, that so-called data
lakes and other large collections of data from
multiple sources and in multiple formats can
be difficult to query.
The data lake can be more like a swamp.
Its hard to do analytics on Hadoop, he said,
referring to the open source repository for
large data sets. The biggest bang for your
buck analytically remains putting your
structured data into a well-modeled SQL
data repository.
The challenge then becomes how to make use
of unstructured and high-volume streaming
data within the analytics program, alongside
the well-modeled data. Now, Ford said, tools
are emerging that can do this efficiently under
a model he called intelligent federation.
Executive Briefing Series: Data Analytics
Data strategies and the user
If analytics is to answer users questions,
analytic products need to be user oriented,
Treasurys Ho said. IT needs to understand,
what are their questions? What are their pain
points? If data is the new oil, we have been
spending a lot of time drilling, and now we
have to start using it, she said.
No agency should assume a single analytics
strategy can fit every situation, said Dr.
Timothy Kropp, senior adviser to the chief
data officer in the HHS Office of Inspector
General. Data stewards are likely to deal
with many skill levels, he said, from average
program users to data scientists.
It therefore becomes important to work with
users, understand what they need to know,
and assemble analytics apps using carefully
chosen, relevant data sets for the problem
at hand. Thats a very different approach
from tossing everything into a warehouse or
Hadoop instance and throwing tools at it.
Freddie Macs Morton stressed the importance
of communication with users. I can buy all
the tools and get all the data in a lake, and it
doesnt mean anything if our senior executives
dont know what action to take. She asked her
data scientists to develop demonstration use
cases to show the so what of data analytics
to the business-line owners.
 By developing use cases for the data agencies
to generate and report, Ho said that Treasury
is trying to ensure the DATA Act becomes
more than a compliance exercise. Her team
is using open source tools to demonstrate
what analytics can derive from the data, and
how those derivations can help a business
challenge.
Peckham recommended an agile-like process
for getting at the core user needs for data
analytics, starting with the questions for
which program managers want answers.
In the case of Medicare fraud, an important
goal is deriving analytics outcomes that
prosecutors would be able to use in court.
Analytics, in essence, is an iterative process,
he said. Its not something that gets served
up. Youre always creating something, but
someone says, Great tweak this.
Kris Rowley, chief data officer of the General
Services Administration, said simple
questions of single transactional systems
are relatively easy to execute. But, As you
escalate the level of the question and the
complexity of the question, thats when you
need data scientists with better and more
sophisticated tools, he said.
Panelists also recommended not overlooking
the importance of data presentation to users
such that its cogent and understandable.
This is where visualization tools come in,
and why its important to involve users at all
stages of a data analysis project.
Executive Briefing Series: Data Analytics
Data analysis priorities
Just as agencies have a variety of data
challenges, as noted in the beginning of
this white paper, they also have a range of
priorities for their data programs.
Peckham of HHS said many agencies, in
response to the DATA Act, want to use
data analytics to understand the return
on investment of technology and other
expenditures. This can lead to better
acquisitions and better program outcomes.
He added, for every agency facing data calls
from OMB or Congress, a well-ordered data
strategy, as envisioned by the DATA Act, can
help manage and speed them up.
Sasala of the Army Department said his
goal for data analysis is enabling improved
decisions. For example, matching personnel
information with logistics data can help
to ensure the greatest lethality. Morton
envisions lowering the costs and raising
the quality of instruments used for housing
finance.
Regardless of the data program goals,
reaching them requires a strategy that
incorporates multiple data sets in a well-
architected system that allows for the
intelligent federation of unstructured, but
important, data sets. The strategy must
also include a way to make data analytics
meaningful and accessible to users.