In this video Darrell from Technology In OPS (#techinops) provides a briefing on how “The Cloud” impacts a Senior Leader. The Cloud is changing how a lot of IT organizations do things and this means that first responders, emergency managers, and security professionals need to adapt. The short video impacts on IT (and your CIO), policy, and governance.
TRANSCRIPT (it’s rough but hey!):
Hey! How are you doing? This is Darrell O’Donnell from Technology in OPS. I’m actually just sitting in a hotel room in Halifax, Nova Scotia, prepping for a meeting, but I just wanted to make a quick recording to bring out another topic for senior leaders, that being Big Data. Big Data is everywhere. It’s actually a pretty popular on the alternative scene too, but Big Data is hitting the IT world as a phrase, as a whole way of being right now. You’re hearing it everywhere, much like the other trends I do talk about but I want to let you know why you should care and what it is you need to know to do your job as a senior leader, as a chief or a senior person in a first responder organization in emergency management in a security organization. There are some angles and pieces you need to understand so that you can enable your team.
The biggest thing behind big data is you can use analytics. You’ll hear that phrase too. Analytics, well it’s analysis but the key here is that the analysis that’s being done under Big Data scenarios really is there to discover things that you would never have found out without it. It’s very easy to think, well we would have figured that out in the first place but when you’re literally looking at millions or billions of points of data, the human brain simply cannot connect some of these dots. There are a lot of non obvious trends. That’s a huge thing when you’re trying to do criminal analysis, when you’re trying to define patterns. The computers are able to spot these patterns that simply the humans we just can’t do directly. That’s a huge thing right there.
One of the things you also need to understand is in order to do analytics; you need to have the data collected. A lot of groups try to dive into Big Data, get the big analytics going, but they’re only data. So you got to make sure that your team is actually gathering something. This will be a hard one to screw up I guess but I’ve seen a few cases where people just assume that they have this new analytics tool and boom, they have the Big Data but they don’t. They have an empty data set. That’s something you do have to consider. Make sure that we do house data collected. You may not be able to go back historically, especially when you’re getting to the paper world, but as you collect more and more stuff in your RMS, in your CAD systems, you’ll have the ability to reach in and do some more analysis but also on the collection side there’s a couple angles you need to really be worried about.
Really privacy is one of the biggest ones. Privacy in Canada, in the EU is huge. In the states it’s not as big but still a pretty big issue. You need to consider the privacy of the individuals, of the citizens, if you’re tracking any information on them, as well as whether that information falls within your mandate, because if you don’t figure it out, the courts will. We’re seeing cases that are just starting to hit, because Big Data is relatively new, where there are changes needed, whether that be that Big Data analytics are gathered but immediately purged within days or hours or weeks, depending on the mandate of a group so that you can’t go back and do the post analysis but you can do the real time type of stuff that’s more important on the real time now situation but you may not be able to dive into the data because the courts have indicated you can’t keep it forever, something you got to think about because as you deal with Big Data and analytics, that’s an angle that a lot of analytics don’t need to worry about, a lot of the big data solutions don’t have to worry about it. If you have to purge this information, it’s something that might be a little bit more unique on the first responder side of the world, on the security side of the world.
When you’re talking with your CIO who’s going to be the one who employs it and the IT group, you need to consider a couple of things. You’re going to want to know what do we already have. You may already have something in the house that is very much like that tool you saw at a conference that one of your partner showed you, one of your peers talked about how their solution is great. Find out from the CIO what the business tools that you already have. That’s typically where these tools are coming out. They’re coming out of IBM Cognos, it’s a great example of one of the BI tools, business intelligence that chews on the big data and spits out a lot of really cool answers. We’re also going to reconsider the extra costs for tools. You may have to ramp up more analysts because as Big Data gets better and more automated, you may have fewer specialized analysts but more general analyst who are using these algorithms that some wizard created. You need to consider the storage cost because storage starts to ramp up really big when you’re doing Big Data. You also need to consider all the security and privacy issues. The security side of things, well you have a Big Data sets big target, is the privacy side becomes what are you allowed to do, comes back to that mandate question. Your CIO’s going to want to understand this, but also are you following the privacy laws in your jurisdiction. I mentioned earlier that you need to consider this data retention and that’s actually what I talked about scrubbing data because your CIO is going to want to know about that and that’s something you’re going to want to tell them because again they may not think about it. The retention is important. They’re going to think about if that’s at 5, 7, 10 years but if they have to destroy data, you really need to understand that ahead of time because if there are legal mandates on how you destroy data and/or you have to prove it. You cannot access data that once it was destroyed. That’s going to impact on the solution your CIO and the IT department is going to build for you.
I just want to say thanks. Hopefully this has helped. Again this series is all about helping senior leaders in the first responder agencies, emergency management, security. Get a handle on some of the topics of the day. If t helps, just subscribe below. We’ll get you regular updates on these videos this whole series. Share with your friends. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m @darrello and I’ve also got a free webinar that we’ve offered out for senior leaders, operators and the teams. This is intended to really bring these people together. Quite often there’s a real big disconnect between the project management technical team and the senior leaders and operators which really results, and I’ve done far too many friends in college for my clients, really result in total failure of a project or a lack of success. Not a total failure, something succeeded but quite often things go down. If you want to reach out privately, lots of links below on how to get a hold of me. Please do so. I’m happy to chat. You want to leave a comment or any questions below, that’d be great. Have an awesome day.