Cloudera Government Solutions’ Henry Sowell: Automated Tools Could Help Agencies Glean Insights From Streaming Data

Henry Sowell, chief information officer for Cloudera Government Solutions, wrote in a guest piece published Wednesday on Nextgov that agencies seeking to optimize streaming data for decision-making should adopt a data platform that could help analyze large volumes of data in real time using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Adopting machine learning capabilities allows agencies to reduce the time needed to gather useful information and make smart decisions,” Sowell wrote.

He called on agencies to plan their data journey, assess use cases, find a partner that could help facilitate adoption of machine learning and come up with a data strategy.

“At the highest level, a data strategy is a guide to highlight the significance of organizational data, recognize its unique attributes, and establish a set of principles to aid decision-making,” Sowell said. “A robust set of policies aimed at making data consistent, clean, and available across the organization’s hardware implementations is key to impacting everything from constituent services and infrastructure planning to resource allocation and national security.”

Sowell noted that agencies should consider using automated and unified platforms for intelligence, governance and security. He also explained how automated tools could provide agencies greater visibility and give context to newly generated and existing data.