Modernizing Government Data Management

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred innovation in state and local governments, and with that has come increased investment in improving IT infrastructure. In fact, Gartner forecasts worldwide government IT spending to total $557.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 6.5% from 2021. Much of this investment will be focused on improving operational agility and analytical capabilities, both of which suffered as the sector transitioned to more remote and distributed operations at the start of the pandemic. 

While there’s promise in modernizing government IT infrastructure, at the core of these initiatives is an area that has long challenged the sector – data management. 

The State of Government Data Management 

The government sector stores a tremendous amount of data. Within these data sets is incredibly valuable information that can improve public health & safety, environmental regulations, transportation and more.

Unfortunately, governments have long been unable to capture this opportunity, largely due to accessibility and usability issues. These challenges can be attributed to:

• Data Silos – As the amount of data stored continues to increase, so do their silos. In the government, this means valuable information stored across various departments such as courts, facilities, transportation or health. These disparate silos make it nearly impossible to gain a complete view of data that can improve collaboration and influence decisions related to budgeting, new laws and more.
• Digitizing Documents – The majority of government documentation is still paper-based. While efforts are underway to digitize these assets, the sheer volume of historical information stored in physical form has made this a time-consuming and expensive task. As a result, the majority of this information is still inaccessible, buried within filing cabinets filled with obsolete information. 
• Legacy Technology – Most government employees are equipped with legacy technology that requires manually searching through content and databases to find the information they need. These processes are labor-intensive and in most cases, key insights are missed.

How Data Fabrics can Help

The data fabric is changing the way government IT professionals can approach modernizing their data management. With a data fabric, IT teams can securely unify content sources across departments of government, regardless of file format or storage location. Most importantly, there’s no need to replicate, move or invest in new data storage options.

Our Layar data fabric takes this a step further. Combining the data fabric architecture with novel approaches to deep learning, IT teams that unify their data within Layar make their content easy to search, explore and visualize. With Layar, users can extract information from a variety of content types including images, spreadsheets, written text, presentation decks, PDFs, unstructured paragraphs and more.

Now government workers can easily search and access documents by asking questions across large sets of data within a single platform; eliminating the headaches associated with manually sifting through various databases and files to identify the information they need.

Greater Data Accessibility Without the Overhaul 

Modernizing government data management is often perceived as coming with large price tags and daunting implementations. With a data fabric, governments can avoid this issue by eliminating the need for costly data migrations that can consume budgets and create new issues for IT teams. As a result, departments can begin to realize the true opportunities hidden within their data, leading to enhanced operations and improved public services. 

Interested in trying Layar? Access a free trial here.