Page 30 - FCW, March/April 2020

Artificial Intelligence
A new approach to
data analytics
Search-driven analytics puts the power of AI in the hands of even nontechnical employees
Monica McEwen
Vice President, Public Sector, ThoughtSpot
upstate New York. When she hurts her back on the job, she’s prescribed an opioid. She spirals into opioid addiction, becomes very sick and develops life-threatening sepsis. The small local hospital is unable to treat her so she is airlifted to a larger hospital in a nearby city, and doctors there are forced to put her on an array of harmful drugs to keep her alive while they wait for lab results to confirm the most effective medication.
Now imagine if you incorporate AI into that story. Applying AI to social determinants could have signaled a potential mental health issue, making
BLOOMBERG REPORTED THAT the federal government spent $2.6 billion on tools to
manage, analyze and visualize data in fiscal 2019. Even with that amount of spending, however, agencies are not able to properly leverage their data for informed decision- making and mission effectiveness.
The current process for creating reports and finding insights in data depends on those with technical skills and is complex, slow and inflexible. Reports are often built on an aggregated view of the data, and dashboards rarely address everybody’s needs. So users end up with a static snapshot that leaves the next question unanswered.
The best of both worlds
A key tool in tackling those challenges is natural language search, which we use with Google, Amazon and a host of other tools in our everyday lives to instantly answer
a variety of questions. When applied to enterprise datasets, the familiarity of search helps speed decision-making and bridge the talent gap because it reduces the need for training. This, in turn, empowers agency employees to engage with data in a more agile, productive way.
People aren’t equipped to manually sift through massive amounts of data to find patterns. But we thrive when it comes to interpreting those patterns and identifying the best path forward. When you augment human skills with technology, you get the best of both worlds.
With search-driven analytics, logisticians could more rapidly prepare for military deployments or humanitarian relief efforts
because they can quickly identify where the people with the right skill sets are located and where the equipment is. Combined with their own situational awareness, they can then determine the most efficient way to deploy those resources.
Using data to solve real-world problems
I’d like to share a story that Jose Arrieta, CIO of the Department of Health and Human Services, often uses to talk about the importance of using data. Imagine a recently divorced mother who lives in rural
davooda/Shutterstock/FCW Staff
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