Big Data in 5 Steps: Lessons from Shawn Kingsberry, CIO of RATB

Big data is a big task. Of the many agencies dealing with massive amounts of data is the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). As an independent agency within the federal government, RATB is focused on providing extensive transparency insights to federal programs as well as preventing waste, fraud and abuse of Recovery Act funds. Since its establishment in 2009, RATB has become one of the swiftest federal agencies in technology.

Dealing with the enormous data associated with tracking all federal spending across the country is no easy task. RATB’s ability to track this excessive amount of data and make it available to citizens through Recovery.gov is quite impressive. The website’s main feature is an interactive map that enables folks to look up how recovery funds are being used within their communities.

GovLoop spoke with Shawn Kingsberry, Chief Information Officer at RATB, to gain insight on the challenges, rewards and key questions regarding how to approach big data. The prevailing challenge is dealing with the huge growth of data. Kingsberry states that “by 2021, we’re going to be looking at 180,000 petabytes [of data] per month” transferred across the web. To compare, in 1990, we dealt with less than 20,000 petabytes per month.

At the same time, this data has the potential for reward in the form of advancing technology that can connect citizens and government. Given this climate of big data, agencies are increasing faced with the action item to tailor their big data strategies towards reward. Through Kingsberry’s expert insights, we outlined 5 essential steps to approaching big data. Want to read about the 5 steps? Take a look GovLoop’s latest guide, Transforming Your Agency with Big Data, to get the details on each step.

Thank you to our industry partners for sponsoring the GovLoop Report, Transforming Your Agency with Big Data. With any questions about this report, please reach out to Pat Fiorenza, Senior Research Analyst, at [email protected].