Big data: What’s the next step?

Today’s guests are Jerry Valerio, enterprise sales consulting manager and DATAvangelist at Tableau Software, and Keith Trippie, CEO, The Trippie Group , with extensive experience with data visualization at large federal agencies.

Petabytes of data and cheap storage are the makings of a perfect storm.  In the last ten years federal information professionals have been bombarded with data. It is streaming in from smart phones, sensors, satellites, it seems like everywhere.  Combine that with inexpensive cloud storage and the problem goes from having a space problem to a problem with gaining insight on those mountains of data.

Tableau Software has the ability to allow federal managers to take that mountain and organize it into a set understandable components.   Years ago data was presented to analysts in the form of green bar paper.  This transitioned into Lotus 1, 2, 3 and then Excel. Rows and columns have remained stagnant for many years.  The main generator of ideas to handle massive amounts of data did not originate from NASA, but from Pixar.

Pixar’s problem was digitizing images with the ability to manipulate them.  Dr. Pat Hanrahan came up with new mathematical models and was one of the founders of Pixar. In 2008 he took that tool set to Pixar to help analysts be able to make decisions rather than spending all day in rows and columns.

During the interview both gentlemen talk about successes federal agencies have had with data visualization.  They even mention a free app, called Vizable, that listeners can download and try out.

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