Two years ago, the White House launched the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative,” a prolific multi-agency attempt to capitalize on the need for accessing and sharing information across six federal agencies. This program was greeted with much fanfare from within the technical community, as big data is a trending topic in the enterprise cloud space and always on the forefront of technology. The success of the initiative is somewhat in question, however, because of the difficulty in collecting, analyzing, and then interpreting big data for practical uses. We have no precedents for any endeavor that is this colossal. Or do we?
