The future of government
Imagine a world where everything from roads to bridges to airplanes are maintained just in advance of them breaking down. A world in which sensors alert public safety agencies of safety hazards before they erupt into disasters. And a future when mobile devices serve up requests for information to citizens within seconds of them posing a question.
Such scenarios are no longer confined to the realm of Star Trek. Thanks to innovations from Microsoft and others, they are very close to reality. And the result will be a far more transparent and responsive government that makes public information easily accessible, while protecting the safety of its citizens.
As the Internet of Things takes hold, governments will equip their communities with numerous sensors to monitor safety, traffic, and other information. They can then tap into this data using the Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics
service in the cloud, which streams millions of such events per second and uncovers real-time insights from these sensors along with data from mobile devices, infrastructure, and applications. In processing these events, Stream Analytics compares multiple real-time streams of information with historical values and models to detect anomalies. Any specific error or condition that appears in the stream triggers an alert, so government officials can make corrections very quickly.
By equipping roads, bridges, vehicles, and planes with sensors, government agencies will be able to predict with precise certainty when specific parts are about to fail and then fix them before they break down. They’ll also be alerted to conditions such as rising carbon dioxide levels and contaminated water in residences, to help avert safety hazards.
In addition to operating more safely, governments will increase their responsiveness by putting big data analytics in the hands of employees and citizens. No longer will big data be solely the domain of computer experts. With Microsoft Azure Data Lake governments can combine an abundance of data in a single repository and then make it available to employees and citizens for mining. Just as a lake stores a lot of water, Data Lake enables vast amounts of original data of any size and format to be securely loaded and streamed into the lake without prior schema definition or data transformation.
With all that data stored in a single repository, employees with the right credentials will be able to use Microsoft Cortana Analytics to transform it into valuable insights that improve their efficiency. Likewise, citizens will be able to mine large repositories of public data to obtain information very quickly. Using their Cortana personal assistant along with Windows speech recognition, employees and citizens will be able to use their voices to ask their devices questions, tapping into the repositories of data to extract the exact information needed, which Cortana delivers up via speech or text.
The implications of this technology are enormous. Think of government jurisdictions struggling to collect unpaid traffic fines. When a citizen walks into a state Department of Motor Vehicles to renew his driver’s license, employees using Cortana will be able to tap into numerous databases around the country and then require the driver to pay any outstanding fines before obtaining his license.
Likewise, imagine a citizen who wants to know when the next public transportation is arriving and whether it would be faster to take light rail or the bus. By posing a question to Cortana on her mobile phone, she can quickly obtain an answer, so she can reach her destination in the shortest amount of time.
The Internet of Things, natural language recognition, and big data analytics are poised to transform the way government works, helping it to improve safety as well as operate far more effectively than in the past. To learn more, please watch our video on machine intelligence and advanced data analytics.
