The Importance Of Big Data In Public Administration

Big data is an emerging and critical technology that governments need to learn to deal with. With an increasing volume of data being generated at all times, data analysis technologies are slowly being adopted by the public sector to get knowledge from these data. However, besides the sheer volume, the speed with which data are generated and the variety of these data represent a challenge to the public administration that was accustomed to dealing with traditional structured data. To encourage big data implementation initiatives, many studies need to be developed to present the advantages and challenges of inserting the disruptive technology into the public domain. There is a gap in the research of big data applied to public administration.

The big data initiatives come, then, to sustain this progress. Civil participation through social media is a new reality that the public sector needs to adapt. Fundamental changes occur due to social transformations and technological advances. Data analysis in public administration involves some important changes in the role of governments and their relationship with citizens. These changes can be understood as electronic democracy, which aims to give voice to people not only in elections, but also in the political decision-making processes that have direct implications in society. According to [45], electronic democracy seeks to take advantage of developments in online decision-making to engage all interested parties in policy-making. Initiatives such as Avaaz already allow people to organize and make inroads into the political and legislative spheres. Big data adds a new dimension to the political debate. Before, matters of interest to society were discussed only within parliaments, and people could only express their opinions at the ballot box. With social networks the reflexes and reactions are immediate. Big data can capture the reaction and opinion of people through social networks and directly influence political

The institutional challenges, presented in table 02, require the establishment of a governance structure to effectively deal with some key issues. Data protection and privacy guarantees are necessary to gain the trust of citizens who share information. To this end, specific laws need to be created to deal with aspects related to the use of personal data. The situation is different when big data is used by government agencies to support their goals. Reference [46] explain that if big data is used for the development of economic policies, health epidemiological researches or for studying the traffic in a large metropolis, there is no problem. In these cases, general standards and statistical correlations are used to promote the efficiency and effectiveness of public policies. However, if the big data is used by the police, a different issue arises, because "while the big data is about processing large amounts of data and detection of general patterns, police need to investigate and possibly arrest individuals based on concrete facts"