Brenda Marie Rivers
Steve Orrin, chief technologies of Intel's federal business, said federal agencies should employ predictive analytics to help their information technology professionals make decisions and plan network modernization efforts.
"Predictive analytics can help them understand what it will take to modernize networks and storage and compute infrastructures to better handle data movement and workload processing," Orrin wrote in a GCN guest piece published Friday.
He said agency IT teams should develop a strategy for incorporating cross-organizational or external data into mission objectives, identify a non-mission-critical target application and implement data collection measures to avoid "analysis paralysis."
According to Orrin, agencies should also ensure that partner companies have the proper government certifications to support predictive analytics programs and are capable of demonstrating a return on investment.
“Agency leaders are less concerned with how many terabytes of data a system is handling than they are with seeing how the results will help current and future missions,†he added.
He recommended that government IT leaders seek industry partners that can implement emerging technological methods that will bring cloud computing tools closer to end devices.
"This allows agencies to react quickly to changing dynamics at a given location, such as a battlefield or disaster relief station, delivering  high-value, analytical data and insights to the right resources at the right time."
