blog When it comes to enterprise IT buzzwords, ‘Big Data’ is right up there at the moment, alongside cloud computing, BYOD and social networking. That’s why we’re sure a few of you will be interested to know that the Australian Government Information Management Office late last week released what it termed a Big Data strategy issues paper (PDF). Australia’s whole of government chief information officer Glenn Archer explains:
I had the opportunity to speak at the AIIA Big Data Summit on Wednesday 13 March and to outline our position on big data and our proposed approach to developing a Big Data Strategy for the Australian Government. I mentioned that I would be releasing an Issues paper on Big Data for public comment – and you can find a link to this below. I am particularly interested to understand the views of the ICT industry, academia, non-government organisations and the public on the themes, challenges and directions described in this paper.
The input received from this public consultation process will be used to guide our development of the Big Data Strategy. We plan to produce a draft version of this strategy in May, and will release this for further public consultation at that time. We hope to complete this work and release the final version in July 2013.
Your writer has had a quick squiz through the discussion paper released last week, and there are indeed some interesting issues, ranging from privacy, security and trust surrounding government-held data, to management and sharing of that data, the actual technology systems involved and the skills necessary to deal with the data flood. In our opinion, the ‘big data’ trend is very much over-hyped at the moment (we haven’t seen many examples yet in Australia where very large datasets have been massaged to produce truly insightful information), but at the very least, the release of this paper should help provoke some thoughtful discussion in the area. We commend it to you.