As agencies deal with a shrinking workforce and limited budgets, the focus on driving more efficiency is more important than ever.
To achieve that efficiency, it’s clear agencies need trusted data, solid governance and integrated systems. All of these depend on a cloud infrastructure that can support data sharing and address the challenges of working across new and legacy IT systems.
On top of the efficiency drive, agencies are under intense pressure to further strengthen efforts to combat fraud, waste and abuse.
The use of artificial intelligence and open data standards are key to improving the drive for efficiencies.
Jennifer Chronis, the vice president of US public sector sales at Snowflake, said to achieve most, if not all, of these goals, agencies must be able to see across all of their datasets, especially when it comes to managing and mitigating risks to programs.
“It’s also important for them to be able to move from just reactive detection of fraud, waste and abuse to proactive detection of fraud, waste and abuse, and we’re doing that with several customers,” Chronis said on the discussion Innovation in Government sponsored by Carahsoft. “We’re doing some work with a large federal health and human services organization. They process more than a trillion payments annually, and for them, it’s been historically difficult to discover fraud, waste and abuse in all of those payments simply because of the siloed data systems that they’re dealing with. Snowflake has partnered with GDIT for several years now to help this organization discover fraud, waste and abuse by modernizing their data platform. We worked with them to modernize over 16 petabytes of data. We’ve been able to cut data query times for them by more than 50 percent, so it’s really, really exciting work.”
Trusted data leads to better analytics
One big difference about the work Snowflake does for this large federal health and human services organization, or any other customer, is the advancements in the technology that make the integration and manipulation of data much more straight forward and secure. Chronis said assigning roles and responsibilities to employees is an important part of creating trust in the information that can lead to confidence in the results of the analysis.
“Customers have to be able to share data without moving it, without copying it and, in some cases, without even having to transform it. So that just makes the ability for a customer to have confidence in their data, much, much stronger because of the simplicity with which we can allow those customers to share it,” she said.
The ability to share and have confidence in the data becomes even more important in battle against fraud, waste and abuse.
The Trump administration has made the detecting and stopping of fraud a top priority for every agency.
Chronis said what is different about the White House’s initiative is the power of artificial intelligence used with trusted data to discover patterns and obtain insights more quickly than ever.
“There used to be a lot of long involved processes to move data into systems in order to be able to detect the anomalies and prevent the fraud. Once you have a solid data foundation, you can implement all of the various AI capabilities that have been changing so rapidly over the last even six months,” she said. “We can use that data in, what we like to say, that semantic layer of the data. That is super important because applying AI models just sort of randomly on open internet data is not going to get you a lot of insights. You need to be able to do it in a system that houses your data and can provide the context and the semantics associated with that data.”
Open standards, open architectures
To continue to make progress and ensure data availability, agencies need to move to open standards and open architectures. Chronis said agencies would see several benefits from using these approaches.
“It helps agencies connect data across existing systems without having to rip and replace. Open architectures help customers make use of that data, regardless of what system, what program, what customer organization owns that data, in order to be able to build upon that data and use it,” she said. “The second is really just reducing vendor lock-in. It’s important for government agencies, in particular, to own their data, to not have to rent their data from any vendor. Open standards and open architectures really give governments the flexibility to adopt new technology like AI and analytics, as their requirements evolve, without having to incur as much expense as they would have if they had been using proprietary standards and architecture.”
While the administration has emphasized the battle against fraud, waste and abuse, Chronis said data and AI tools also can drive success in other mission and back-office functions.
Chronis said natural language AI agents are valuable for developing applications to address specific mission areas without the employee having any expertise in programming.
“Natural language AI agents allow customers to just ask questions of data and develop applications using plain old English,” she said. “We’ve been able to develop demos for customers with large volumes of data that would have taken custom developers and large involved contracts months to pull demos together. We’ve been able to do those things in hours. One, in particular, for a customer recently, we did in about five hours with the basic demo capability with lots of human resources data. We used synthetic data, and it was something that would have taken them months previously. So we’re really seeing customers want to try to do those things as quickly as possible, and helping them and enabling them along that journey is really important to us.”
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