APRIL 2013 • ISSUE 17 GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Big data
Can the cloud save your back end?
Treat your citizens like numbers
Ballarat’s skills incubator
ROUNDTABLE: DATA CENTRES
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BUILDING MOBILE APPS
Broadband policy smackdown: Labor vs Coalition
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cover story: Big data: Treat your citizens like numbers If you thought it was already hard to keep track of your agency’s data, fasten your seatbelts: big data is legitimising data hoarding and helping agencies release previously unknown value from both structured and unstructured information. It’s a hidden user manual for government reinvention – but are you ready to tap its potential?
SPECIAL features
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10
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regulars 2 Editor’s letter 4 News 38 Opinions: Kevin Noonan, ESRI, Efficiency Leaders, Nuance, Technology One, Ezscan, Datacom 64 NBN Update
Features 28 Regional centres, global innovation GTR looks inside Australia’s largest and most successful technology park, where a long-running public-private partnership is tackling the IT skills crisis. 32 e-government broadband: Labor v Coalition For all its many facets, the September election will in part be a referendum on the progress and future of the national broadband network (NBN). We canvas both parties’ positions on the future of broadband-enabled e-government. 32 City of Gosford An investment in virtual servers and desktops has improved Gosford’s operational resilience. 51 Conference wrap: DIMS, CCF 2013 Highlights from GTR’s Cloud Computing Forum 2013 and Digital Information Management & Security 2013 events.
Case studies 16 University of Ballarat A team of University of Ballarat researchers is repurposing old waterresource and sports-participation data to uncover striking new information. 26 Australian Bureau of Statistics A mobile app is literally putting the ABS’ vast repositories of data at the fingertips of its users – and empowering
Building mobile apps
Roundtable: Data centres
Mobile apps are powerful tools for engaging and empowering citizens. But be careful before you dive in: getting a mobile app working is one thing – but getting a useful mobile app working is something entirely different. GTR gets tips from those who have already gone app happy.
A glut of new data centres has spoilt Australian government agencies for choice when it comes to picking a data centre for their hosting cloudcomputing efforts. But where do we go from here? We bring together four leading data-centre industry players to get their thoughts.
government in the process. 48 New Zealand Transport Authority
Migrating a data warehouse with 1.7 billion records was only part of a major systems modernisation for the NZ roads authority.
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Far too much late-night TV watching has made me, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, a closet fan of the show ‘Hoarders’. If you have not seen it, this is a display of schadenfreude in which cameras linger over homes choked with the detritus of human existence: old furniture, newspapers, clothing, rubbish, pizza boxes and often the pizza itself. The residents are often blissfully unaware that they are suffocating themselves underneath ever-growing mountains of stuff – or they know it, but lack the will to fix it. Managers of large enterprise data stores can no doubt relate. Many information environments have grown in quite the same way over the years, with accumulations of ever more voluminous corporate data creating the bizarre situation where IT staff spend more time maintaining the data than they do in helping the business actually do anything with it. The growing popularity of big data cuts both ways. On the one hand, it’s encouraging businesses to feed their inner hoarders, accumulating data on nearly every aspect of their operations in the hope that it might be useful one day. This requires an ever-increasing investment in data management technologies and processes, which take on increasing urgency when the corporate mandate becomes an explicit instruction to keep just about everything. On the other hand, big data recognises that public and private-sector organisations are accumulating this data anyway – so they might as well use it. Fed by evolving AGIMO policy and growing recognition that governments are a cornucopia of valuable but untapped information, big data has become government’s biggest threat – and its biggest opportunity – for years. One of the many uses for big-data initiatives will be to deliver information to mobile devices that allow analysis by departmental executives, front-line staff – or even by citizens themselves. This sort of interactivity is the vanguard of the brave new world of e-government – but, as you’ll see in our building mobile apps feature, joining it requires a lot more than just a good idea. In this issue, we also consider whether traditional monolithic enterprise business applications are set for a shakeup that could counteract the nightmare flood of failed government projects in the past. We also tour an innovative skills-development facility in Ballarat, Victoria where IBM, the Victorian state government, University of Ballarat and City of Ballarat have seen great results. Speaking of results, there’s an election on the boil – and it’s going to be a fierce one. Whether the national broadband network (NBN) will be a major issue or not, remains to be seen – but this issue’s broadband feature nonetheless positions both parties’ policies to give you a sense of how their respective priorities might change e-government positioning depending on the election’s outcome. There’s lots more buried in the following pages; the best way to find out what, is to start flipping those pages. And, as always, please flip me an email if there’s anything you’d like to say, share, or see from GTR in the future.
EDITOR David Braue e: editor@govtechreview.com.au NATIONAL SALES MANAGER Yuri Mamistvalov e: yuri@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5008 ART DIRECTOR Annette Epifanidis e: annette@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5030 DESIGN & PRODUCTION Nicholas Thorne CONTRIBUTORS Tom Scicluna, Lee Fisher, Demos Gougoulas, Brad Howarth, Adam Turner, Kevin Noonan, Jeff Segarra, Alicia Kouparitsas MELBOURNE OFFICE Level 8, 574 St Kilda Rd. Melbourne Vic 3004 PO Box 6137, St Kilda Rd Central 8008 Phone: 03 8534 5000 Fax: 03 9530 8911
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AGIMO shaping policy mandate for govt “drowning” in big data Federal government policy-setting body AGIMO has released a big-data strategy issues paper outlining the results of early efforts of the organisation’s big-data brainstorming to date, government CIO Glenn Archer said in announcing the release of the paper. Addressing the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) backed Navigating Big Data Summit in Canberra, Archer noted that AGIMO had already conducted extensive discussions – with government bodies, privatesector organisations, and peers in the US, UK, New Zealand and Canada – in an effort to identify best-practice methods for aggregating, analysing and making use of massive quantities of data. “Australian public service agencies collect very significant volumes of information,” Archer said. “They relate to citizens and businesses, organisations’ internal operations, the nature of interactions with external parties such as suppliers and communities.” “Analytical tools…. Offer enormous opportunities to improve the way we deliver services to citizens,” he continued. “We’re looking to develop new policy about how we can use big data and analytic tools to get a strategic approach for a whole-of-government view of data
management – and to build better policy options for government and for ministers to consider.” Open for comment into April and due for completion by mid-year, the big-data paper
Figure 1
Big data and cloud computing value graph
Investment / Capacity
Traditional Hardware Investment Cloud Investment Missed Opportunity
Time
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Actual Usage
(bit.ly/154yLUP) isn’t AGIMO’s only nod to the big-data explosion: AGIMO and an Australian Taxation Office-sponsored working group recently brought together departmental representatives and academics from numerous institutions to define the terms of reference for a planned Data Analytics Centre of Excellence, which will serve as a centrepiece of the government’s efforts to tap into the benefits of big data. Development of big-data guidelines, best practices and technological tools had become a key priority for AGIMO and other government bodies as government organisations were increasingly finding themselves “drowning in the data” they had collected, Dr Brenton Cooper, technical director for information superiority with the Defence Systems Innovation Centre (DSIC) told the audience. “Rather than being task driven, they’re trying to make the processes they deal with, data driven,” explained Cooper, who has worked extensively with Department of Defence agencies to help them get on top of their growing data stores. To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/WJK7OK.
Employers focus on retention as ICT staff shortage, election bite The impact of a severe shortage of ICT skills is only being moderated by weakening demand from the government sector as the uncertainty around this year’s federal election bites the labour market, the latest Clarius Skills index has found. Compiled quarterly by employment specialist Clarius, the index (bit.ly/Ze7xag) compares industry demand for a range of skills, with the supply in the market for those skills. A rating of 100 indicates that supply and demand are matched, while values above 100 suggest a shortage of particular skills and values below 100, an oversupply. The latest figures suggested that demand for ICT managers has softened since December 2007, when the survey put that category at 100.7; the latest figure was 98.2, up slightly from a five-year low of 97.6 in September 2012.
The category called ICT Professionals, however, showed a less positive story. While the market balance had improved markedly from December 2007 – when the ranking of 110.4 put the category into an extreme shortage – the latest figures had it at 102.2, which Clarius classifies as a ‘very high’ shortage. Taken together, the ICT-related categories represented a net shortage of 4600 staff – making ICT the industry sector in the most need of additional staff. This, according to Clarius Group CEO Kym Quick, will push employers to focus more intensely on retention strategies to avoid becoming casualties of the higher demand. “Positive economic signals are reversing [past] poor business sentiment, and this should lead to increased hiring activity,” Quick said in a statement. “This encourages candidates, who have stayed put in recent years, to look for new opportunity – hence the churn. As a result,
businesses are concerned they will lose key talent and IP to competitors.” “It’s even tougher for companies operating in sectors where there are professional skills shortages because competition for the best talent will be fierce.” Another technology-related jobs category, ICT and Telecommunications Technicians, was in a better situation, with a rating of 98.1 suggesting there were enough skills in the market. But all areas of the jobs market are likely to see changes in the leadup to the election: while many will welcome the certainty provided by the announcement of the election, the Clarius report warned that the announcement of the election “is already beginning to affect decision making on certain projects, particularly in government sectors.” To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/148o8UA.
Open data, industry collaboration drive new Victorian ICT strategy Open data plays a significant role in the strategy, with organisations expected to make 1000 data sets available by September this year. Among the other targets set by the minister are technology-specific goals, such as the requirement that major service delivery agencies transition three key transactions online by 31 December 2014; that they target a 15% reduction in customer effort from baseline by December 2014; and that they commence five service interoperability projects by July 2014. A review of and implementation of ICT governance and organisational structures will be complete by March 2013. By June this year, all major ICT-enabled projects will have adopted High Value Risk processes and by July, the industry will be regularly engaged in the design phase of major government solutions. The strategy sets a goal of having ten government apps developed externally by March 2014. “This is an unprecedented shift in the way in which government engages with the ICT industry for the delivery of ICT services and systems to government meet new demand,” Rich-Phillips said, noting that government
agencies will develop five policies, services or solutions using co-design and/or co-production by December 2014. “It is about effectively managing ICT expenditure by developing an innovative culture that manages risk, increases productivity, and delivers better services through innovation – and in doing so, helps to stimulate growth in the industry.” By December 2014, the government will introduce analytics and reporting against agency KPIs. By that time, the strategy is expected to have delivered a 15% direct cost reduction through shared or reused ICT solutions. To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/14cVvpK.
Gordon Rich-Phillips
Victoria’s state government will overhaul its ICT strategy with aggressive open-data initiatives – which will see agencies releasing 1000 data sets for public use this year – and “unprecedented” moves to better engage with local suppliers, state ICT minister Gordon Rich-Phillips told the audience at an AIIA luncheon where he launched the new Victorian Government ICT Strategy. Finalised after a public and industry consultation process over the course of the past year, the strategy outlines 50 hard action points for 2013 and 2014 that will seek to improve the process of ICT implementation – a process that, the minister noted, had been severely compromised by ongoing ICT-related issues with the likes of the Myki ticketing system and the state’s CenITex sharedservices organisation. “ICT is fundamental to improving service capability,” Rich-Phillips said. “Byt with ICT expenditure of around $1.5 billion per year, we need to ensure that is appropriately managed and that we have the capabilities in place to manage this in a strategic and holistic way.”
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Netsuite takes cloud skills to uni as ICT salaries stagnate Business-applications provider Netsuite has scored a vote of academic legitimacy for cloud applications by getting the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to integrate cloud training into its postgraduate MBA and Master of Business courses. The partnership comes under the auspices of Netsuite’s SuiteAcademy educational program, which has been developed to boost the presence of cloud-based business tools within university curricula. This will see students trained on the use of NetSuite, a broad cloud-based business software platform, to learn how it mirrors realworld process flows and revenue cycles. SuiteAcademy has already attracted over 100 universities around the world, all of whom are trying to update their business credentials
to make them as relevant as possible for the modern business world. “Our partnership with NetSuite is about producing work-ready graduates for a market rapidly embracing cloud computing,” UTS Business School dean Prof Roy Green said in a statement. “Given cloud software automates many traditional professional functions, our graduates need to be lateral thinkers capable of adding value to organisations in new ways.” Those lateral thinkers may be working smarter as well as harder, but that doesn’t mean they and their ICT-management peers will necessarily see the benefits of their efforts in the form of increased salaries. The recently released Hudson ICT Salary & Employment Insights 2013 report
(bit.ly/Y02vmd) found that fully 75.1% of ICT professionals are taking on more responsibilities than they had a year ago, but that 56.1% said they had not been financially compensated for the added responsibilities. In other words, job descriptions may be changing but employee value-add isn’t necessarily being recognised with commensurate pay rises. It’s also not necessarily due to the impetus of the employees themselves: in many cases, workers are simply being given more responsibility after a teammate leaves and – in four out of five cases – isn’t replaced by the employer. To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/1619i0B.
Australia no malware source but new security threats persist Australia is the region’s fifth most-targeted country for malware attacks but tight local regulations have kept it off the leader boards in metrics such as the number of malware host servers, the latest security threat report from security firm Websense has found. The Websense 2013 Threat Report (bit. ly/13FahVE) found that, despite growing user awareness of some kinds of security threats, malware authors were continuing to gain ground through a combination of brute-force
attacks and subtle, below-the-radar activity through which their malicious code is able to evade technological security controls. Noting that the number of malicious URLs was up 430% last year in the AsiaPacific region compared with 2011, Bob Hansmann, senior product marketing manager with Websense, said organisations’ actual susceptibility to this risk profile varied widely and often related to user behaviour more than technological protections.
2012 email total threat breakdown (content and urls)
2012 email breakdown (content only)
Malware Attachments 0.4%
Phishing 1.6%
Legitimate 21.6%
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Spam 76.4%
Spam 6.1%
Legitimate 21.6%
“Today’s attacks are multi-stage and start with email or phishing,” he told GTR. “The kinds of things Australia has done have prevented Australia from being a host for these kinds of attacks, but you’re still going to find yourselves targeted victims as [Australian] users are perhaps a little more open to clicking things” than users in other countries. Concerted education campaigns can impact infection rates, as in the case of oncemassive rogue antivirus malware, which tells users they’re infected with a virus and directs them to an infective URL to “fix” it. “This had about an 18-month run,” Hansmann said, “and today there are still over 200,000 URLs Malicious that are active, fake antivirus 72.3% or rogue antivirus. But the number of people that actually encounter and click on it is very, very low because users have become aware of it – and don’t fall for it anymore.” To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/WVLI57.
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BYOD makes employees happier, companies more profitable: survey Organisations embracing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) are seeing significant improvements in sales, profits and productivity after adapting their work processes around consumer technologies, a recent survey has found. Many organisations have resisted BYOD because of its disruptive technology and the potential security risks it introduces. However, the research findings – by Avanade, a global solutions and managed-services provider, which surveyed nearly 600 C-level executives in Australia and 18 other countries – suggested overwhelmingly that embracing consumer technologies makes workers happier and more productive by letting them work with technology they know. Within Australia, the results suggested, 83% of companies that have changed their business processes to accommodate consumer technologies, have seen positive benefits afterwards. This included 34% reporting increased profits, 40% reporting better work being produced, and 57% that have been able to respond to customers more quickly than before. “Australian companies are embracing consumer technologies in the workplace at a higher rate than their global counterparts and are more willing to change business processes to accommodate emerging work trends,” Avanade’s Australian country manager, Jeyan Jeevaratnam, said in a statement. “This progressive approach is leading to tangible benefits.” While some of the findings were consistent with widely-held ideas about mobility – for example, that 62% of employees use personal devices in the workplace or that an equal proportion use smartphones for basic work tasks like reading email, online documents and calendar invitations – others were something of a surprise. Specifically, the Avanade research showed a strong preference for tablet computers, with one-third of respondents indicating they use tablets
for advanced business purposes such as CRM, project management, content creation, and data analysis. This figure was slightly lower than the 40% that use tablets for basic work tasks – but shows how quickly tablets have gained status as serious business tools. To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/YGUXAz.
BYOD sandbox tech gets Defence security tick Government organisations wanting to manage bring your own device (BYOD) rollouts using ‘sandbox’ security technology have a new option after Good Technology’s Good for Enterprise (GFE) received Defence Signals Directorate Cryptographic Evaluation (DCE) certification. GFE’s presence on the Evaluated Products List, listing devices and environments that have been tested and approved for secure government use, makes it a tool of choice for other government agencies concerned about maintaining the integrity and security of their information. The current certification provides EAL4+ recognition for GFE, which is the first mobilecontainer technology to sit on the list. It joins the likes of Apple’s iOS, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5, and the BlackBerry 10 mobile
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operating system – which was approved in a pre-release coup that helped the upstart platform make its case for government takeup. Designed to provide a highly-protected workspace to which access can be tightly controlled and information protected, GFE supports iOS, Android and Windows Mobile devices. However, the DSD certification only extends to iOS devices at this point – allowing iPhones and iPads running GFE to access and store information classified at up to PROTECTED level. The need to quickly certify mobile enablement tools has not been lost on the DSD, which continually revises its accreditation capabilities to provide relevant guidance for government agencies. “DSD’s certification of Good Technology’s secure container enables Government
departments to unleash far more power and productivity from iOS devices without compromising on cyber security,” said Chris Roberts, vice president of world-wide public sector with Good Technology, in a statement. “The key requirement for public sector organisations should be to minimise risk of data being compromised, such as ‘leaking’ from devices or networks.” An early user of GFE is the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, which has deployed GFE’s encrypted container technology and found that it minimises ICT support overheads while maintaining an adequate security boundary around the government information. To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/WJL3ml.
Big-data storage needs big-storage data Organisations must run their numbers well to ensure they’re getting the most bang for their data-storage buck when adopting storage-intensive big-data strategies, a senior economist with storage giant Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has warned. Noting that organisations must consider different storage architectures depending on their data requirements, HDS chief economist David Merrill has told GTR that a quick study in the dynamics of ‘storage economics’ – HDS, for one, has identified 34 different kinds of enterprisestorage costs – can be invaluable for organisations that haven’t revisited their storage costs in a while.
“For the past few years, storage has been highly deterministic,” Merrill explains. “We can talk about the total cost, and with a mapping system can map [requirements] to solutions that are proven to reduce costs. This leads to very easy discussions with senior managers, storage directors and CIOs who know how the economics of storage behave.” Organisations trying to shovel massive volumes of big-data information into a data warehouse are likely to find their costs become unsustainable if they insist on using just expensive, high-performance disks. The economic impact of such strategies quickly becomes obvious once they’re applied to careful storage-economics analysis –
and the results can be an eye-opener. “The economic model exposes architectural mistakes that were made in building up to big data,” says Merrill, who blogs regularly on the challenges and opportunities of costing storage strategies. “When they first do big data, organisations build proofs of concept, then keep replicating that initial design. This is fine for a test-bed, but the economics change as you build out to several hundred or thousand nodes, and several hundred terabytes of data. Storage economics helps us know when an architecture is economically unsustainable.” To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/YguhLk.
Vic ICT strategy drives telecoms procurement, Web revamp The state of Victoria is revamping the sourcing of telecommunications by state government agencies with a rebranded procurement arrangement designed to improve service levels, reduce costs and increase competition across the sector. The new program, known as VicConnect, will modernise the decade-old Telecommunications Purchasing and Management Strategy (TPAMS) to reflect changes in the market since its introduction. Currently being floated past a range of ICT industry organisations for feedback, VicConnect will address connectivity, mobility and collaboration services. VicConnect is among the first program deliverables to be kicked off in the wake of the state’s formal Victorian Government ICT Strategy, which technology minister Gordon Rich-Phillips presaged last year and launched at an AIIA event in February in which he anticipated “unprecedented” industry engagement around the 50 hard action points in the document. “This is about effectively managing ICT expenditure,” he said, “by developing an innovative culture that manages risk, increases productivity, and delivers better services through innovation – and in doing so, helps to stimulate growth in the industry.” VicConnect isn’t the only initiative to stem from the launch of the ICT strategy: the state government also recently debuted a totally
revamped version of the state’s top-level Web portal, which receives over 450,000 unique visitors per month. The new version of vic.gov.au – the site’s first overhaul since 2003 – is mobileoptimised and has a focus on effective search capabilities, with linkages into a
range of social media services; lists of topic-based direct information feeds; a consolidated Twitter feed for the entire state government; and a directory of Victorian government mobile apps. To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/YFndaB.
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b ig data
Big data
Treat your citizens like numbers
In an economic climate where government agencies are being pushed to do more with less, big data is emerging as a means to take an asset that agencies have in abundance and put it to good use.
Story by Brad Howarth
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A
cross Australia government agencies are looking at how they can use new big data techniques for analysis of large volumes of structured and unstructured data, utilising a new range of tools that provide faster and cheaper analytics capabilities than traditional data warehouse and reporting tools. The goal is to gain greater knowledge from their data stores, and much more quickly than has been possible with traditional techniques. While many of the technologies involved are based on open source tools and commodity hardware, big data is causing a rethink in how data is used and the types of data being analysed. According to IBM Global Business Service’s partner for public sector Joana Valente, public sector agencies around the world are looking to big data to increase the efficiency of service delivery. “With tightening budgets and an aging population with declining revenue coming in, and pressure on their ability to access skilled resources, the ability to deliver the same services more cost-effectively is critical,” Valente says. “Data is really the only lever available to government executives that can deliver them concurrently improved cost efficiency as well as improved customer satisfaction.” She cites one long-running example in the US, where the Social Security Administration has been using data analytics to recommend which claims for disability entitlements require further investigation, and which don’t. “What they did was look at all of the different kinds of cases that it had in train, and developed a business approach to ascertaining which of those cases could be approved faster, because they presented less risk and there was an obvious need to deliver the benefit to the individual,” Valente says. She says that project has delivered more than US$2 billion (A$1.93 billion) in savings over a period of five years through more efficient use of the department’s resources.
Patrick Bodegraven
Real-time government In Australia, SAP is working with NSW Fire & Rescue to use big data analytics for real-time situational awareness. SAP’s head of industry and industry principal for Public Sector, Patrick Bodegraven, says Fire & Rescue is using SAP’s HANA in-memory database technology to analyse data to determine where events are happening and issue alerts, and even forecast where events are going to happen. “Big data is going from knowing what you know today, to knowing what is potentially going to happen in the future, and anticipate and respond accordingly,” Bodegraven says. He adds that HANA is also being used by public sector agencies around the world to find gaps in
“Big data can include ‘found’ data sources such as social media feeds….the relationship between those sources and the high quality measures produced by the statistical agencies is problematic.” revenue collection, such as non-compliance in the payment of infringements and penalties. “By using big data and consolidating information from different data sources one agency was able to identify where debt existed, and was also able to identify the best ways of facilitating the payments,” Bodegraven says. “It has facilitated an increase in the velocity of payments, and determined the best time of day to call people and follow them up about these outstanding debts and penalties. Numerous Australian public sector agencies are looking for their own ways to harness Big Data. At the federal level a big data working group has been formed to develop a whole-of-government strategy and determine the best ways to develop the practices, skills, frameworks and common infrastructure to deal with big data collectively (see sidebar overleaf ). Treasury, in particular, is an agency that has long grappled with big data problems in terms of modelling the Australian economy. A year ago it commissioned its Odysseus data warehouse, based on Microsoft technology, as the repository of data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Reserve Bank of Australia and other sources. Odysseus was commissioned for modelling the domestic economy, but its use is now being broadened to other groups within Treasury. While Odysseus represents a breakthrough for Treasury analysts, this data is generally considered to come from so-called lag indicators. Hence Treasury CIO Peter Alexander is excited by new frontiers in what he refers to as “true Big Data” – including analysis of unstructured social media data, and even data from environmental sensors.
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b ig data
A b i g - d ata c a l l t o a c t i o n The extent of the government’s snowballing support for big-data analysis has become clear not only from successful early work by government agencies, but by the very vocal and explicit support for bigdata investments from the highest echelons of government. Senator Stephen Conroy – who not only serves as minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy but acts as the minister assisting the prime minister on digital productivity – reiterated this support in opening the AIIA big data Analytics Summit in Canberra in March. “The convergence of cloud computing and big data technologies is a pivotal development with significant implications for both business and government,” he said. “The byproduct of computing evolution means the amount of data available has exploded beyond anyone’s early imaginings. “The challenge of creating structures so that data could be used, has been replaced by the use of computing power on unstructured data,” Conroy continued, citing figures from the UK Policy Exchange that suggested better use of big data could deliver £33 billion (A$47.9 billion) in productivity savings every year through improving efficiency of government operations, improving fraud and error detection, and “making further inroads into the tax gap.” “‘Lost’ data, that was previously unusable and unwanted, now has real and unrealised value,” he continued. “It is a mine of important information able to be tapped…. Business and government stand to generate significant productivity gains through its effective use. “The question becomes, how do we make the best use of the opportunities presented by big data – and how can we do it in a transparent way that respects privacy and has the confidence and trust of citizens?” Conroy’s call to action was echoed by AGIMO’s Glenn Archer, the Australian government CIO and a first assistant secretary within the Governance and Resource Management division of the Department of Finance and Deregulation. As the peak body for Australian-government ICT policymaking, AGIMO has recently turned its sights to big data and, in mid March, released a draft of a big-data strategy (bit.ly/154yLUP) designed to provoke discussion and promote agencies’ moves to take advantage of big data. Although the benefits of big data are incontrovertible, Archer said the policy will also focus on helping government agencies address privacy concerns such as the inadvertent surfacing of personal data through big-data data matching. “It’s clear that the collection and correlation of multiple, disparate data sources will magnify the potential effect of seemingly innocuous data, which can expose or reveal sensitive information about an individual,” he said. “We know this could be a problem and need to make sure that agencies think about it, and how to best manage this risk. We need to have discussions with industry and others to ensure that government continues to get it right, and that the community has confidence in our ability to control access to that data, and to ensure it’s appropriately maintained.” The final big-data strategy is expected to be published around mid-year, with comments open through April. – David Braue Glenn Archer of AGIMO: Steering the Australian government’s big-data agenda
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“Data is really the only lever available to government executives that can deliver them concurrently improved cost efficiency as well as improved customer satisfaction.” According to Alexander, Treasury is working with the CSIRO to adopt a tool originally developed for the Department of Human Services to perform sentiment analysis in real time using social media data. “We’re not so much interested in the sentiment towards the Treasury brand, but we are asking what sentiment analysis could we do in terms of broader economics across cost-of-living and shopping prices and such,” Alexander says. “If we can compare that with real time or lead indicators that come out of social media, we can see if there is a correlation between what people are saying and what we are seeing in these lag indicators as they come through.” The goal is to be able to provide better data to government in relation to trends that may assist with policy setting. He cautions however that it is early days for the project, with participation stretching back only a couple of months, and no actual results delivered as yet. Ultimately however he feels that such initiatives may assist in Treasury’s broader role of growing the economic wellbeing of Australia. “These are things that Treasury is thinking about, and if we can get real time data that may help,” Alexander says. “I think it is a real positive for government. We now know that there are tools we can use where if we can grab all this data we can get something useful. “The biggest change is the cultural, as you’ve got a kind of bricks-andmortar thinking that you’ve got to break. Big data, data analytics, data science – these things
Peter Alexander
are serious business. And Treasury is a serious data player and we want to do more with it.”
Structured, unstructured While Alexander is excited about the possibilities of Big Data, he is aligned with many other agencies in taking a cautious approach to its implementation. Indeed, for some agencies big data is a doubled-edged sword.
The ABS, for instance, is used to dealing with big data problems – but the collection methods and reliability of big data make it unsuitable for inclusion in many of the services that the ABS provides. ABS director Ric Clarke says that big data represents a significant issue for statistical officers around the world. “We think there are tremendous opportunities that it provides to statistical agencies in the way they gather data and provide national statistics, in a timely and relevant fashion,” Clarke says. “But we are still looking at how we might usefully apply the tools and techniques that are now becoming popular.”
Today the ABS collects 80 per cent of its data through targeted surveys and the Census, and only 20 per cent through administrative and transactional data sources. This controlled method of gathering data produces high quality results. However, big data – which can include ‘found’ data sources such as social media feeds – often lacks a firm data provision agreement, and the relationship between those sources and the high quality measures produced by the statistical agencies is problematic. Clarke acknowledges that the promise of big data may lead to new models that are suitable
“big data is going from knowing what you know today, to knowing what is potentially going to happen in the future, and anticipate and respond accordingly.”
Robert Wickham
b ig data
for specific use cases, as big data technologies make possible types of analysis that would have been too time consuming and, therefore, too expensive to explore. “Increasingly operational decision makers want to have access to information that may not be as accurate, but is fit for purpose and able to support decision making in a short time frame,” he says. The ABS has created a big data Laboratory, although Clarke downplays is significance within the overall activities of the bureau. But overall he is excited about the possibilities that big data delivers: “It’s a fantastic time to be in this industry,” he says. “It’s a watershed moment for us.”
Big-data technologies The range of big data solutions in the market today is staggering, especially when considering that the term itself has barely been in use for two years. Many of these tools are built around the NoSQL concept – which breaks free of the conventions of building databases around tables, and is embodied in open source programming models for processing large data sets, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Cassandra. These enable massive volumes of data to be processed at low cost and at high speed across distributed commodity hardware. These technologies have been implemented in numerous commercial products, such as the Greenplum analytics platform acquired by EMC
“For some agencies big data is a doubled-edged sword….The ABS, for instance, is used to dealing with big data problems – but the collection methods and reliability of big data make it unsuitable for inclusion in many of the services that the ABS provides.”
in 2010. Other tools include the Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing (AMPP) architecture developed by Netezza, which was acquired by IBM in the same year. Oracle has also released a range of NoSQL big data appliances, combining hardware and software into pre-engineered systems, including a pre-built Hadoop cluster, which SAP is tackling big data through a combination of Hadoop and HANA. While the technology solutions are still emerging, one factor holding back big data is finding the people with the skills to use it. This issue was noted by, among others, Senator Stephen Conroy – who, in opening the AIIA big data Analytics Summit in Canberra in March, highlighted the government’s role in promoting the development of big-data experts: “There is high demand for new, unique and highly specialised skills to support work in the area of big data,” he said. “These include the ability to engineer software to work across different storage systems, and the mathematical and machine learning known-how to analyse the data.” Robert Wickham, Oracle’s general manager for Exadata and big data Solutions, says big data hinges on analytically minded people – often referred to as data scientists – who are in short supply. “And you would probably think the private sector might get first dibs on those skills rather than the public sector,” Wickham says. “So I think the public sector is going to have to do a really good job of attracting and retaining and making it interesting for people who have those skills.”