Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with JR Reagan, Federal Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte Services (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take use cases of real customer problems and how you are using large-scale visualization to add value to those problems and generate solutions.

JR Reagan: One unique problem we thought was interesting comes from one of the large global retailers. Around the time of Hurricane Irene [in August 2011] they called us up on a Friday at noon and said, “What we need quickly is to have the ability to see what is happening from where our stores are located as well as where the hurricane is going to impact us in lots of different ways – where roads are being closed, where curfews are, where the supply chain is going to be impacted, etc.” We had to do this in a very short time. This was Friday noon. By Friday evening we had a prototype together. We talk about prototypes over presentation – having something quickly that we can put together and show to the client so he says, “That is exactly what I am talking about,” or, “No, let’s change that.” Then we were able to get a final version of that by 8 a.m. the next morning. It was an interesting problem, because it didn’t only involve the data they owned in their own four walls, but allowed data they didn’t own. We think that was a very interesting dynamic, because they have lots of tools and smart people, but they didn’t have the ability to visualize what they needed and do it quickly. That is one example of the kinds of problems we come up with.

SM: What are the data sources and what are the visualization tools and technologies you were using to get where you wanted to get to in this example?

JR: The data came in all different sizes and shapes. Those are near real-time data streams from social media, supply chain analytics, etc. Those really matter. If a store is impacted, there are lots of cascading effects to that. What do I need to bring there? Who does it impact? Where is it now? But they wanted to see it. They wanted to see a map – with layers. Depending on the question they wanted to answer, they could turn things on and off in order to see that. This case was a very geographic approach to layering on lots of different types of information. We use a lot of open source types of technologies. Traditional HTML5, JavaScript, etc. There are so many great widgets that have been created out there and we use those a lot. We used them, we layered them upon a map, we used a lot of open source geo-spatial APIs, and we created some of our own framework so we could bring together that layering aspect I mentioned before. On the back end, whether it is for this particular project or for other ones, we are plugging into things like Hadoop or Cassandra, as well as what we see from Academia. Things like D3 are being used also.

SM: What is the charter of your lab? Is solving government problems your main charter or, since you have innovation attached to the lab, does that also do a lot of internal innovation work?

JR: We started out primarily focused on the federal world. We were based around the government in Washington D.C. But it was interesting to observe the transformation of that. It wasn’t us evangelizing it. It was actually our clients talking to other clients. You have to go out there and experience this for yourself – there is this safe place to re-imagine your problems and figure things out. It turned out that we started getting just as many commercial clients – whether those were retailers, banks, or pharmaceutical companies.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with JR Reagan, Federal Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte Services
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