By Jamal Hartenstein, JD, CISSP, CGEIT, PMP

The Greater Sacramento Capitol Chapter of ARMA recently held its annual Records Knowledge Conference, which brought together records managers from city, county, and state clerk offices.

According to our local ARMA chapter, ARMA is dedicated to providing education and resources to those in the Records Management and Information Governance fields. They are committed to enhancing Records Management and Information Governance professionals through training, networking, leadership, and outreach.

The conference attendees brought a sense of eagerness to learn and share—ARMA chapter leadership gave event attendees a special opportunity to hear from world-class speakers—including and a lead researcher on the IBM Watson project, Dr. Ashish Kundu—on some of the most important and cutting-edge topics.

Along with a formidable group CEOs, I was honored to be asked to speak about Cybersecurity Threats to Information Governance. Highlights of the event and major takeaways included:

• Understanding what data you have, who accesses it, and where it goes is paramount.
• Conflicts among document retention policies, industry best practices, and laws suggest that we seek out and use the highest common denominator.
• Trending topics and buzzwords the government sector include players like Smart Communities, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital ID, Blockchain, NIST, and the KAI Partners approach to security assessments.
• Data Migrations are underway. Records Managers who respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for public records or subpoena must deliver records formats adhering to general business practices, which may be legacy.
• Regarding Third Party Risk Management (TPRM), cloud services, and Business Associate Agreements, liability points back to the data controller regardless of contracts with data processors or third parties.
• Mobile device management and data/device ownership remain a point of contention and confusion during public record requests.
• Innovation is forcing a cultural shift in workforce demands and understandings of emerging technologies.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions can be used to categorize and classify data, performing some of the tasks of current Data Custodians and Data Owners.
• While AI may not replace Records Managers, Records Managers who understand and embrace AI will inevitably replace those who do not.

Public sector IT innovation and modernization means systems and processes change rapidly. One example of this is California Assembly Bill 2658, recently signed into law by the governor. This new law updates the definition of an Electronic Record to include blockchain and smart contracts as legally recognized records. It sends a clear signal that digital records management, particularly blockchain technology and smart contracts, are priorities for a more innovative and dynamic public sector.

This new law impacts public records requests because entries logged in public agency-owned private blockchains are electronic records. These records are susceptible to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Records Managers may benefit from technology that makes the identification and delivery of public records to requestors easier. It may also create convenience for those exercising Public Records Act (PRA) requests. It’s a double-edged sword; it streamlines the processes but increases PRA volume at the same time.

The discussion of the California blockchain law was one most important topics discussed at the ARMA event. Another popular topic was IT Security Assessments.

The urgency in public sector data governance and records management is an incredible opportunity to embed IT security controls for the public sector personnel working at the heart of the ever-expanding challenges.

KAI Partners performs security assessments to address the multitude of challenges facing the public sector. Our assessments help ensure secure and efficient delivery systems where the organizational objectives align with the development of strategic plans and programs. In addition, KAI Partners’ training division—KAIP Academy—works to address technical skills gaps. Our training courses include ITIL, Project Management, Agile/Scrum, and more.

Were you at the ARMA Conference? What were your biggest takeaways about public sector innovation?

About the Author: IT Security Program Manager at KAI Partners, Jamal Hartenstein is a cybersecurity legal expert who has helped some of the country’s largest financial institutions, healthcare companies, and federal agencies develop their IT Security Roadmap programs. In his current role, Jamal provides guidance to executive staff and security professionals on laws, frameworks, and policies that help shape their strategic plan, and helps organizations innovate safely and securely. Prior to working for KAI Partners, Jamal served as an Electronic Warfare Sergeant in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps, where he was a steward for Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) framework. He earned his undergraduate degree from Georgia Military College and his Juris Doctorate from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in California.

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By Sid Richardson, PMP, CSM

I have been in the data warehousing practice since 1994, when I implemented a successful Distributed Data Warehouse for a flagship banking product, followed by co-developing Oracle’s Data Warehouse Methodology. In August 1997, I was invited to speak at the Data Warehouse Institute Conference in Boston.

Over the years, I’ve researched and implemented what I would consider some small scale/junior Big Data systems. I have an interest in Big Data and wanted to share my learnings on Big Data and Hadoop as a high-level overview for the layperson / busy executive.

What is Big Data?

Big Data defines an IT approach used to process the enormous amounts of available information from social media, emails, log files, text, camera/video, sensors, website clickstreams, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, audio, and other sources of information in combination with existing computer files and database data.

In the 1990s, three major trends occurred to make up Big Data: “Big” Transaction Data, “Big” Interaction Data, and “Big” Data Processing.

In 2001, Big Data was defined by Doug Laney, former Vice President and Distinguished Analyst with the Gartner Chief Data Officer (CDO) research and advisory team. Mr. Laney defined Big Data by the “three Vs”:

1. 1. Velocity – Speed of incoming data feeds.
   2. Variety – Unstructured data, social media, documents, images.
   3. Volume – Large quantities of data.

IBM decided to add two more Vs:

• 1. Veracity – Accuracy of the data.
  2. Value – To define Big Data.

Why do we need Big Data?

In a nutshell: We need Big Data because there is a lot of data to process, for example:

• Google needs to index the entire web—daily.
• Yahoo! needs to perform similar data intensive processing.
• Facebook is home to approximately 845 million users and about 40+ billion photos.
• According to The Economist, in 2010, Walmart handled more than 1 million customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress.

Also noted by The Economist, the abundance of data and tools to capture, process, and share all this information already exceeds the available storage space (and the number of eyes on the planet to review and analyze it all!)

According to Forbes’s 2018 article, “How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read,” there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. And, over the last two years alone, 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.

Clearly, the creation of data is expanding at an astonishing pace—from the amount of data being produced to the way in which it’s re-structured for analysis and used. This trend presents enormous challenges, but it also presents incredible opportunities.

You’re probably thinking, alright, I get the big data thing, but why couldn’t data warehouses perform this role? Well, data warehouses are large, complex, and expensive projects that typically run approximately 12-18 month-long durations with high failure rates (The failure rate of data warehouses across all industries is high—Gartner once estimated that as many as 50 percent of data warehouse projects would have only limited acceptance or fail entirely).

A new approach to handle Big Data was born: Hadoop.

What is Hadoop?

In a nutshell, Hadoop is a Java-based framework governed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) that initially addressed the ‘Volume’ and ‘Variety’ aspects of Big Data and provided a distributed, fault-tolerant, batched data processing environment (one record at a time, but designed to scale to Petabyte-sized file processing).

Hadoop was created out of a need to substantially reduce the cost of storage for massive volumes of data for analysis and does so by emulating a distributed parallel processing environment by networking many cheap, existing commodity processors and storage together, rather than using dedicated hardware and storage solutions.

Why Hadoop?

• Eighty percent of the world’s data is unstructured, meaning it cannot fit neatly into a database. Video data is an example of this—most businesses don’t have the capability or resources to analyze this data.
• Before Hadoop, data storage was expensive. Hadoop, however, lets you store as much data as you want in whatever form you need, simply by adding more servers to a Hadoop cluster.
• Hadoop’s approach makes data storage cheaper than before; what made Hadoop so popular was the creation of massive volumes of storage for analysis.

The Challenges with Hadoop

There is a limited understanding about Hadoop across the IT industry. Hadoop has operational limitations and performance challenges—you need to resort to several extended components to make it work and to make it reliable. And, Hadoop is becoming more fragmented, pulled by different commercial players trying to leverage their own solutions.

In summary…

The Hadoop Framework addresses a number of previous challenges facing the processing of Big Data for analysis. The explosion in deployment of data capture devices across all industries world-wide necessitated a more cost-effective way to store and access the massive volumes of data accumulating by the second!

I hope this blog post has provided you with a better understanding of some key Big Data and Hadoop concepts and technologies. Have you worked with Big Data and/or Hadoop? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

P.S. If you have gotten this far and are curious where the name Hadoop comes from, here you go! The name ‘Hadoop’ was coined by one of the sons of Doug Cutting, a software designer and advocate and creator of open-source search technology. Mr. Cutting’s son gave the name ‘Hadoop’ to his toy elephant and Mr. Cutting used the name for his open source project because it was easy to pronounce.

About the Author: Mr. Richardson’s passion is Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Master Data Management and Data Architectures. He has helped Fortune 500 companies in the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia lead large-scale corporate system and data initiatives and teams to success. His experience spans 30 years in the Information Technology space, specifically with experience in data warehousing, business intelligence, information management, data migrations, converged infrastructures and recently Big Data. Mr. Richardson’s industry experience includes: Finance and Banking, government, utilities, insurance, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, large-scale engineering and transportation sectors.

You know we offer ITIL exam prep courses through KAIP Academy, but if you’re on the fence about whether this class is right for you, check out this FAQ! Do you have a question we didn’t answer? Ask it in the comments or email academy@kaipartners.com! Then click here to register for a KAIP Academy course!

There are many paths to success and while not everyone takes the same path, we often manage to arrive at the same destination. In our KAI Partners Staff Profile series, we share interviews and insight from some of our own employees here at KAI Partners. Our staff brings a diversity in education, professional, and life experience, all of which demonstrate that the traditional route is not necessarily the one that must be traveled in order to achieve success.

Today, we bring you the journey of Nick Sherrell, a Senior Project Manager who works with the Project Management Office for one of KAI Partners’ public sector health care clients.

KAI Partners, Inc.: How did you get into your line of work?

Nick: Oddly enough, it all started with me wanting to become a Physician Assistant! Part of getting into a PA program requires shadowing an acting PA and gaining hands-on experience into the nature of the work. While shadowing a PA at the Sacramento Native American Health Center (SNAHC), I ended up being offered an opportunity to work for the clinic as a Patient Care Coordinator. My experience in this role opened my eyes to the number of challenges people faced in interacting with the health care system as a whole. Many people struggle to gain access to affordable, quality health care. This role changed my career trajectory from clinical care to wanting to help be a part of impacting the system to ensure more people are able to access quality care and live healthier lives. From then on, I have worked in roles gaining more and more experience and responsibility doing work within health care systems. This ultimately led to roles in Quality, Performance Improvement, Tech Implementation, Clinical Variation Reduction, and Project Management.

KAI: Are there any certifications or trainings you’ve gone through that have helped in your career?

Nick: Absolutely! The first thing I realized when I made my decision to move from clinical care to administration was that I needed to gain more knowledge of business. My college career to that point focused heavily on the Sciences (Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, etc.). I decided to go back to school to obtain an MBA at UC Davis. This experience helped my career TREMENDOUSLY!

KAI: What is your favorite part about your line of work and why?

Nick: I love seeing hard work translate into better process and more efficient systems and seeing that work reverberate throughout the community.

KAI: What is one of the most common questions you receive from clients and what counsel or advice do you give them?

Nick: A question I often get is “how can we get better at what we are doing?” My counsel or advice is usually based in first knowing where you are, embracing the imperfection, and building a measurable path to improvement through multiple small steps. Too often I encounter organizations that have a fear-based culture when it comes to metrics. It usually starts with a manager or executive who reviews metrics and lashes out at any report that spits out anything in red ink. Staff become afraid of being the messenger of sharing the red ink information, and then ultimately (and sometimes subconsciously) start to do things to prevent the red.

My advice, EMBRACE THE RED! Red doesn’t necessarily mean poor performance, it means an opportunity to work together to improve something. For me, it’s more of a Eureka moment!

Now that we’ve learned more about Nick’s background and project management work, here’s a little more about him!

Quick Q&A with Nick:

Daily, must-visit website: MLB At-Bat App. ALL the highlights!

Preferred genre of music or podcast to listen to:  Usually of the Rock / Blues / Acoustic variety. Podcasts, anything funny! Right now, I’m listening to ‘Conan Needs A Friend.’ Good stuff!

Best professional advice received: Measure it, but make it worth measuring!

Book you can read over and over again: Dragons Love Tacos (guess who has a two-year-old?!)

Most-recent binge-watched show: Game of Thrones.

About Nick: Nick Sherrell is a Project Manager with over 10 years of healthcare experience ranging from Quality, Performance Improvement, Technology Implementation, Data Analysis, and Consulting. Nick has worked with organizations ranging from the Sacramento Native American Health Center, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Blue Shield of California, and The Advisory Board Company. He currently works for KAI Partners, Inc as a Project Manager Consultant on a Public contract with the State of California. He received his MBA from UC Davis in 2015 with an emphasis in Organizational Behavior and Innovation. He became a Certified ScrumMaster in 2018 through Scrum Alliance training offered at KAIP Academy. He lives in Sacramento with his wife, two children, and Golden Retriever Emma. Find Nick on LinkedIn here.