Top Five Nominees For The Government Big Data Solutions Award

Governments (local, State, Federal, International) need more agility. This is especially true in the domain of Information Technology. Information technology is one of the fastest moving industries, but the government is slow at adopting and procuring new technology, including the technology that would make it more agile and adaptive.

There are things we can do to accelerate innovation in governments. One key method is to recognize success and help highlight lessons learned relevant to replicating success. In an attempt to help do this, CTOlabs established the Government Big Data Solutions Award. The winner will be announced at Hadoop World 2011. The award and briefing prior to the award will help inform the Big Data community about government missions, challenges, and successes and to show the public sector Big Data possibilities and use cases, encouraging understanding and interaction between communities.

Many critical federal missions can benefit from Big Data technologies. Examples include detecting financial fraud, cybersecurity, geospatial and location-based data search, real-time search and recommendation engines, and research in fields such as bioinformatics. These problems require scalable solutions for vast amounts of complex information delivered despite constrained budgets. Federal integrators, the DoD and Intelligence Community, the national labs, the Office of Management and Budget, and the General Services Administration are most active with both Big Data problems and solutions, which are already making a difference. The Government Big Data Award aims to highlight this work and it’s effects.

The judges for the award are experienced innovators in Big Data, IT, and government. They are Doug Cutting, open source search technology inventor and advocate, Chris Dorobek of Dorobekinsider.com, Ed Grandstand of the QinetiQ Strategic Solution Center, Ryan LaSalle of Accenture Technology Labs, and experienced Federal CIO Alan Wade.

This year’s top nominees for the Government Big Data Solutions Award are: