Republic of the Philippines

Mindanao State University- Iligan Institute of Technology

College of Engineering and Technology
A. Bonifacio Avenue, Tibanga, Iligan City
GEC 108
Science, Technology and Society

Big Data – Driven Innovation in Government Sector

Cleff Justeme Butalid1, Cloyd Cabulay2, Desiree Daulong3 and Hidaya Daud4
Cleff Justeme Butalid: cleffjusteme.butalid@g.msuiit.edu.ph
Cloyd Cabulay: cloyd.cabulay@g.msuiit.edu.ph
Desiree Daulong: desiree.daulong@g.msuiit.edu.ph
Hidaya Daud: hidaya.daud@g.msuiit.edu.ph

Abstract: Big data is changing the way government agencies store, manage and
collect data. The Government sector, Public sector, or State sector, in general needs
to capture data from a variety of sources. But they still face major challenges ranging
regarding Big Data. Big data has the potential despite the high operational and
strategic impacts. So far, many studies have been conducted to comprehend the
application of big data in different fields for various purposes. However, a
comprehensive review is still lacking in Big Data in the Government sector. Big data
is an essential aspect of innovation which already changes the relationship between
citizens and government by empowering citizens to understand political and social
issues in new transparent ways, allowing them to engage with local, regional,
national, and global issues through participation. This paper presents an interpretive
framework that analyses the definitional perspectives and the applications of Big
Data in the Government sector. Thus, this study aims to conduct a literature review
on Big Data in Government sector in order to explore its potentials that provide
benefits in the country. This study provides a guideline for future studies and
highlights new insights and directions for the successful utilization of Big Data in
Government sector.

Key Words: Data; Big Data; Government Sector; Application; Innovation

1. INTRODUCTION sharing, transferring and processing large datasets

across organizations. One reason for the growth of
such huge numbers of datasets is digitalization, the
Driven by Globalization, the use of Big
increased use of electronic devices and the growing
Data as a resource has been acknowledged from
popularity of social media (Hellerstein, 2008; Lohr,
various industries because of its application to data
2012). Big Data is a collection of data that is huge
analytics. The world is changing rapidly due to the
in volume, yet growing exponentially with time. It
emergence of innovative technologies (Chae,
is data with such large size and complexity that
2019). Population is even getting higher and
none of traditional data management tools can
information or data stored are exceeded. Thus, we
store it or process it efficiently. Big data is also
need big data to gather and store large amounts of
data but with huge size. The use of Big Data is
information for eventual analysis. The term “big
becoming common these days by companies to
data” refers to data that is so large, fast or complex
outperform their peers. In most industries, existing
that it’s difficult or impossible to process using
competitors and new entrants alike will use the
traditional methods. The act of accessing and
strategies resulting from the analyzed data to
storing large amounts of information for analytics
compete, innovate and capture value. Big Data
has been around a long time. Currently, a large
helps the organizations to create new growth
number of technological devices are used by
opportunities and entirely new categories of
individuals (Shorfuzzaman, Hossain, Nazir,
companies that can combine and analyze industry
Muhammad, & Alamri, 2019).
data.
The concept of Big Data is emerging as
new challenges appear in analyzing, archiving,
 Almost each sector has developed a
fascination with the ostensibly new discovery of Big
Data and its extraordinary capabilities to fuel
analytical breakthroughs since 2012 (Reinhalter &
Wittmann, 2014). The importance of big data does
not revolve around how much data a company has
but how a company utilizes the collected data.
Every company uses data in its own way; the more
efficiently a company uses its data, the more
potential it has to grow. As a source of economic
growth and development, big data constitutes an
infrastructural resource that could be used in
several ways to produce different products and
services. It also enables creation of knowledge that
is vital for controlling natural phenomena, social
systems, or organizational processes and supports
complex decision-making (OECD 2014).
Many white papers, journal articles, and
business reports have proposed ways governments
can use big data to help them serve their citizens
and overcome national challenges (such as rising
health care costs, job creation, natural disasters,
and terrorism). There is also some skepticism as to
whether it can actually improve government
operations, as governments must develop new
capabilities and adopt new technologies (such as
Hadoop and NoSQL) to transform it into
information through data organization and
analytics ( GanG-hoon Kim, siLV ana tRimi, anD Ji-
hYonG chunG 2014). Big data is very useful and
has a big impact on the government sector. Along
with many other areas, big data in government can
have an enormous impact from local, national and
global. With so many complex issues on the table
today, governments have their work cut out trying
to make sense of all the information they receive
and make vital decisions that affect millions of
people. The public sector is aware of the potential
value to be gained from big data. The Government
leaders generate and collect vast quantities of data
through their everyday activities. Governments
around the world always face a very huge amount
of data every single day. The reason behind this is
they have to keep track of various records and
databases regarding the citizens. The proper study
and analysis of this data helps the Governments in
endless ways.
At every point between the government
and people, data is created. This data is being
generated and transmitted from a wide variety of
sources. Data comes in all shapes and sizes: from
citizens, law enforcement communities, businesses,
other government entities, hospitals, utilities,
roads, courts and so on. Empowering government
entities to collect meaningful data and then analyze
and understand it in order to make better
decisions. The government is fully aware of the
underlying value in all their data. By unifying
these data, they can make connections across
agencies to better serve citizens. Government
digital archiving rates and data being generated
are on the rise. Big data is expanding and becoming
more complex. With that, this makes information
management, processing, storage, and security
more complex as well.
This study aims to review the potential of
Big Data in the Government sector. The goal of this
study is to completely review the literature
associated with Big Data in the Government sector
and to seek contributions of Big Data through its
application and benefits in the Government sector.
This focuses only on Big Data in the
Government sector, its application and benefits.
2. APPLICATIONS OF BIG DATA
2.1 EDUCATION
Data collected can be analyzed in a
variety of different ways. Information collected on
students and faculty can lead to new insights that
can improve the way schools work. Simply put, Big
Data is changing the way schools educate their
students. It has led to different learning models
and concepts and it is possible using Big Data to
obtain a much greater understanding of how to
ensure students are successful. Big Data in
education helps the government to understand
educational needs in both urban and rural areas
better. This ensures the youth have access to the
highest quality of education, which would always
be of a great benefit to the country in the future.
(IDC, 2018)
2.2 HEALTH CARE
According to Durcevic, and Sandra (2020),
big data in healthcare is a term used to describe
massive volumes of information created by the
adoption of digital technologies that collect
patients' records and help in managing hospital
performance, otherwise too large and complex for
traditional technologies.
The application of big data analytics in
healthcare has a lot of positive and also life-saving
outcomes. In essence, big-style data refers to the
vast quantities of information created by the
digitization of everything that gets consolidated
and analyzed by specific technologies. Applied to
healthcare, it will use specific health data of a
population (or of a particular individual) and
 Republic of the Philippines
Mindanao State University- Iligan Institute of Technology
College of Engineering and Technology
A. Bonifacio Avenue, Tibanga, Iligan City
GEC 108
Science, Technology and Society

potentially help to prevent epidemics, cure disease, very large, complex data sets. (Matthew Harding
cut down costs, etc. Big data has changed the way and Jonathan Hersh, 2010).
we manage, analyze, and leverage data across
industries. One of the most notable areas where 2.3.1 Agriculture
data analytics is making big changes is healthcare.
In fact, healthcare analytics has the Big data applications in agriculture are a
potential to reduce costs of treatment, predict combination of technology and analytics. It entails
outbreaks of epidemics, avoid preventable diseases, the collection, compilation, and timely processing of
and improve the quality of life in general. The new data to help scientists and farmers make
average human lifespan is increasing across the better and more informed decisions. Farming
world population, which poses new challenges to processes are increasingly becoming data-enabled
today’s treatment delivery methods. Health and data-driven, thanks to smart machines and
professionals, just like business entrepreneurs, are sensors that generate vast amounts of farm data.
capable of collecting massive amounts of data and (Sharma, Rohit 2020).
look for the best strategies to use these numbers.
18 Examples of Big Data Analytics in
Healthcare That Can Save People/applications of 2.3.2 Transportation
data in healthcare
The biggest issue in the transportation
1. Patients Predictions For Improved industry today is the constant lack of time. As
Staffing freight transport demands increase, transportation
2. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) companies need solutions to manage logistics and
3. Real-Time Alerting supply chain operations more effectively. In the
4. Enhancing Patient Engagement process of searching for these solutions an
5. Prevent Opioid Abuse emerging number of companies are embracing the
6. Using Health Data For Informed opportunities that big data provides.
Strategic Planning In transportation the number of data
7. Big Data Might Just Cure Cancer sources is increasing rapidly. The practice of using
8. Predictive Analytics In big data includes collecting relevant electronic
Healthcare information from various sources in a very short
9. Reduce Fraud And Enhance amount of time. This practice brings lots of
Security advantages to the transportation industry. As
10. Telemedicine millions of citizens use public roads every day, it
11. Integrating Big-Style Data With can be both driving and walking. In fact, many
Medical Imaging factors contribute to safety on the road, such as the
12. A Way To Prevent Unnecessary state of the roads, police officers, vehicle safety, and
ER V isits weather conditions. With the said factors, it is
13. Smart Staffing & Personnel almost impossible to control everything that might
Management lead to an accident. This time, through Big Data it
14. Learning & Development allows governments to oversee the transportation
15. Advanced Risk & Disease sector to ensure safer roads, better and new roads.
Management The introduction of big data and smart
16. Suicide & Self-Harm Prevention technologies has resulted in many positive changes
17. Improved Supply Chain for the transportation sector. Operational efficiency
Management and flexibility have increased, fuel consumption
18. Developing New Therapies & has been reduced, and customer experiences have
Innovations drastically improved. Big data also helps with
improving safety in transportation. (Craig Robins,
2.3 ECONOMY 2002). The government agencies can analyze the
data acquired from traffic flow on different roads
whether it is from rural areas or urban areas. The
Big Data allows for better prediction of
analytic tools help in collecting the real-time traffic
economic phenomena and improves causal
data transmitted by road sensors, video cameras,
inference. Machine learning techniques allow
and GPS devices. With this, the information allows
researchers to create simple models that describe
traffic managers to identify potential threats to
road safety. Any identified potential threat to the
flow of traffic in urban areas is solved by adjusting
public transportation routes in real-time.
2.3.3 Finance and Insurance
The finance and insurance by nature has
been an intensively data-driven industry for many
years, with financial institutes having managed
large quantities of customer data and using data
analytics in areas such as capital market trading.
With the help of big data technologies not only can
value be more efficiently extracted from such a data
source, but the analysis of this form of
unstructured data in conjunction with a wide
variety of datasets to extract faster, targeted
commercial value. (GanG-hoon Kim, siLV ana
tRimi, anD Ji-hYonG chunG, 2014). This increases
the prevalence of data which falls into the domain
of big data, i.e. high volume, high velocity, and high
variety of information to the advent of market, new
customer, and data which is available in multiple
sources.
The finance and insurance sector is known
as a data-driven industry. It is based on exploiting
banks and insurance companies ‘own data to create
new business value. Big data represents a unique
opportunity for most banking and financial services
organizations to leverage their customer data to
transform their business, realize new revenue
opportunities, manage risk, and address customer
loyalty. In fact, apart from the technological
aspects, there are organizational, cultural, and
legal factors that will play a key role in how the
financial services market takes on big data for its
operations and business development. The
deployment of big data must be aligned with
business objectives for a successful adoption of the
new emerging technology in return to the
maximum business value.
2.3.4 Manufacturing
Big data presents many promising and
differentiating opportunities and challenges for
industrial manufacturers, including aerospace and
defense companies, auto manufacturers, heavy
equipment manufacturers, electronics companies,
oil and gas companies, and other organizations that
produce consumer and capital goods. Like most
commercial enterprises, industrial manufacturers
have operational and business data about their
finances, inventories, products, human resources,
distributors and partners. Industrial
manufacturers are poised to use big data
technologies to capitalize on this and many other
sources of data to optimize manufacturing and field
operations and, in some cases, address key business
needs by integrating the data from and into the
products themselves (Schroeck, Michael, Rebecca
Shockley, Dr. Janet Smart, Professor Dolores
Romero-Morales and Professor Peter Tufano, 2012).
Big data will enable the customer needs through
accurately targeted products and effective
distribution. With that, it will completely create
new business models in the area of mass production
through Big Data.
In the manufacturing, tools for data
acquisition need to be processed with large
amounts of sensor data. Appropriate data
visualization tools must be available and integrated
to support browsing, controlling, and decision-
making in the planning and execution process.
Those tools need to handle sensor data that may be
incompatible with other sensor data and thus data
integration challenges need to be tackled, especially
when sensor data is passed through multiple
companies in a value chain.
Data processing costs decrease while the
storage capacities increase, data can now be
continuously gathered. Manufacturing companies
as well as retailers may monitor channels like
Facebook, Twitter, or news for any mentions and
analyse these data (e.g. customer sentiment
analysis). Retailers on the web are also collecting
large amounts of data by storing log files and
combining that information with other data sources
such as sales data in order to analyse and predict
customer behaviour. In the field of manufacturing,
all participating devices are nowadays
interconnected (e.g. sensors, RFID), such that vital
information is constantly gathered in order to
predict defective parts at an early stage (José
María Cavanillas, ‎Edward Curry, ‎Wolfgang
Wahlster, 2016).
2.4 SECURITY
Big Data analytics are used to identify
anomalies and suspicious behavior. The acquired
information helps in detecting malware and
unauthorized access attempts. Finding solutions to
ensure data security and privacy may unlock the
massive potential of big data in the public sector.
Advances in the protection and privacy of data are
key for the Government sector, as it may allow the
scanning of huge amounts of data owned by the
Government sector without revealing sensitive
information. From the contributed article of GanG-
hoon Kim, siLV ana tRimi, anD Ji-hYonG chunG,
2014 claimed that the Government sector
 Republic of the Philippines
Mindanao State University- Iligan Institute of Technology
College of Engineering and Technology
A. Bonifacio Avenue, Tibanga, Iligan City
GEC 108
Science, Technology and Society
regulations restrict the use of data for different
purposes for which it was collected. Privacy and
security issues are also preventing the use of cloud
infrastructures (e.g. processing, storage) by many
public agencies that deal with sensitive data. A
new approach to security in cloud infrastructure
may eliminate this barrier.
3. DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS
New technology such as this Big Data
brought a big impact and effectiveness throughout
the different applications used which greatly
helped for processing and sourcing of multiple
informational data. From a theoretical and
practical point of view, big data applications
present a wide or vast of procedures, processes and
benefits. Big data technologies, such as
decentralized networking and distributed
computing for scalable data storage and scalable
data analytics, semantic technologies and
ontologies, machine learning, natural language
processing, and other data mining techniques have
been the focus of research projects for many years.
Moreover, big data contributes in many ways in
industrial sectors because it enhances the different
techniques so as to help in addressing the problems
that may be encountered in every application.
Analyzing the application in education, it
brings big insights and overview to the students
and to the teachers on how they will apply the
process of learning. Through big data it ensures the
youth have access to the highest quality of
education, which would always be of a great benefit
to the country in the future, also to assess students
in terms of their educational needs is either
technological advancements or awareness and
physical way of teaching. In the healthcare domain,
big data contributes meaningfully to the
government, to the hospitals as well as to the
medical staff who know the data which can be the
basis for the new innovation of determining any
diseases and curing through medicine exploration.
Big data technologies can be used to produce new
insight about the effectiveness of treatments and
this knowledge can be used to increase quality of
care. Moreover, in the field of economy, big data
contributes essentially, because it produces new
inventions of technologies, ways on how to assess
good income of the people and to the country in
general. Agriculture, transportation,
manufacturing, finance and insurance, and media
and entertainment were some of the attributes in
the economy so as to give an impact in economic
expansion and businesses. Without big data, people
didn’t know the impact and importance of these
attributes for the purpose of sustaining life as a
human being. Lastly, big data contributes to safety
and peacefulness in terms of security, because
through big data we know the different
technologies just to improve our security and some
of the examples are CCTV cameras, weapons
against armed personnel, etc. However, in order to
benefit from the value of these big data
applications, the industry requires new
reimbursement models that reward the quality
instead of quantity of treatments.
Within all benefits or advantages of big
data as stated above, now, aside from giving and
citing all of these we should also consider the
different challenges of big data. All industrial
sectors it became clear that it was not the
availability of technology, but the lack of business
cases and business models that is hindering the
implementation of big data. Here are some
challenges of big data; The amount of data being
collected, Collecting meaningful and real-time data,
V isual representation of data, Data from multiple
sources, Inaccessible data, Poor quality data,
Pressure from the top, Lack of support, Confusion
or anxiety, Budget, Shortage of skills, and Scaling
data analysis. If these will be neglected, all the
data analytics will be extremely invaluable and
might cause destruction or bad outcomes. Also,
they will not improve decision-making, decrease
accountability, non-benefit of financial health, and
not help employees to predict losses and monitor
performance. Apparently, the importance of 5V ’s;
(volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value) in big
data are very significant; it contributes to
widespread knowledge on how to use big data in
different applications. These 5V ’s have been of
relevance. In addition, government sectors that are
already reviewing themselves in the light of the big
data era add further V s to reflect sector-specific
aspects and to adapt the big data paradigm to their
particular needs. Moreover, some various open-
source platforms/software to store and process this
Big Data such as: Hadoop, HPCC, Cassandra, Hive,
and Spark are also commonly used in evaluating
the process and storing of big data.
4. CONCLUSION
Big data plays an important role to
successfully achieve holistic development in a
country. Thriving to gather the data from various
sectors of the government is vital for an immediate
action in planning and coming up with a
satisfactory measure that will help its citizens.
According to Kim, et. al (2014), businesses use Big
Data to earn profits, and the Government must use
it to promote public good.
In 2012 by the E-government survey of the
United Nation, three countries such as Japan,
South Korea, and Singapore adopted and initiated
programs in using this emerging technology (Big
Data). The Philippines, a third-world country, faces
many difficulties in managing its constituents,
challenges and problems happening all over the
country. Such new technology will help the
government lessen their work and provide guidance
in all their actions. Information is a strategic asset,
and the government needs to protect, leverage, and
analyze both structured and unstructured
information to better serve and meet mission
requirements (Iron Mountain, 2021).
However, challenges occurred inevitably
not only in Big Data but to all emerging
technologies. Some challenges met by big data are
its complexity, security, risks to privacy, as well as
a need for new technology and human skills (Kim,
et. al., 2014). Solutions and techniques are needed
to solve these problems. This shouldn’t be the
hindrance in aiming for a high quality governance
and prosperous country.
The authors would also like to recommend
other applications of big data that can help and are
under the sector of government. Moreover, this
study will also gain insights for future researchers.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to express their
warmest gratitude to the following people who
supported and sacrificed their precious time for
making the completion of this study possible:
To Professor Jonathan M. Tiongson,
MSCE, for providing the answers and solutions
that perplexed the author’s mind. Despite being
busy, he was able to guide and share his ideas.
To their friends and classmates, for their
positive encouragements;
To their families, for their love, support
and understanding; and importantly
To Almighty God, for His unfailing grace
and guidance, for bestowing the wisdom and
knowledge to successfully work on this journal
article.
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A. Bonifacio Avenue, Tibanga, Iligan City
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Science, Technology and Society

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