Federal institutions have a monumental burden to address as they work to respond to urgent needs on a national scale. The United States Postal Service, in particular, has numerous issues to address in the coming year, including reaching more users, tracking information and enforcing data security. Fedscoop reports that the USPS plans to answer those challenges with a new means of structuring legacy applications.
The agency's plan is to reassess the technology it uses on a regular basis and streamline data access while promoting security for users. The USPS manages hundreds of thousands of employees, with 160,000 legacy vehicles and 15,000 mobile devices currently in use. Successfully gathering data from these sources requires a sophisticated approach to analyzing information.
John Edgar, the vice president of information technology for the USPS, talked to the source about plans for the future. He said that one of the main goals for the organization in the new year will be addressing information taken from different sources and using it to make analytical judgments.
"Some of it is in our data warehouse, but a lot of it is in the original source systems of record, and obviously, from an operational standpoint, you've got to be careful about how people use that information within the systems of record so you don't affect performance," Edgar said, referring to the desired future model of storage as a "data lake."
Last month, the USPS announced that it had been compromised by a security breach potentially affecting the medical information of 800,000 people. Since then, the organization has attempted to police its cybersecurity practices and, in the words of Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, work on "maintaining the wall."
Well thought-out plans can make a legacy system modernization plan more feasible and positively impact data monitoring.