Overview of Big Data Challenges, Opportunities and Its Applications in the Context of Public Administration Organizations

Abstract

Big Data has been empowering organizations to scrutinize considerably large volumes of structured and unstructured data. Thus, several companies have been benefiting from Big Data to enhance its decision making by delivering data and drawing conclusions from the projected valuable information. Public sectors are presently in a situation to consolidate their data with the acquired large data sets that serves the public interest specially to inform government policy decisions, support economic development, increase citizen participation, generate trust in the government, and make knowledge accessible. Governments create information, by collecting data from their citizens and institutions, and using that to support their own decision-making, planning and reporting. They generate and collect vast quantities of data through their everyday activities, such as managing pensions and allowance payments, tax collection, national health systems, recording traffic data, and issuing official documents. The public sector is becoming increasingly aware of the potential value to be gained from big data. In spite of building multifaceted big data architecture with more technology components, real data analysis in a timely manner still continues to be a major obstacle. The main aim of this study is to identify the challenges and opportunities of Big Data at public sectors when using data sources, processing and storage of data and techniques used for data analytics. The paper provides an overview of requirements and technologies considered for current big data platforms such as sources of data generation, big data tools for data processing and storage of data and big data analytics techniques for government and public sector by exploring the current literature in the area. It tries to identify the gap in applying Big Data in the context of public sector and achieve a comprehensive understanding of Big Data in the public sector.