E-Government Adoption And Framework For Big Data Analytics In Nigeria

ABSTRACT

The continuous advances in today’s digital universe and integration of computing into virtually every facet of human life are no doubt making the concept of Big Data a ubiquitous paradigm for deploying novel technologies/applications hitherto not practicable by conventional methods. Big Data, a general term for the massive amount of digital data being generated from different sources, extremely large, structured/unstructured too complex for analysis through conventional relational database techniques. It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is added each day of which approximately 90% is unstructured. This Big Data offers new opportunities for discovery, value creation, and rich business intelligence for decision support in any organization. Nigeria as a country is steadily moving towards digitizing some of the government departments, scheme and services in Federal, State and Local government levels. Due to increase in digital literacy of the people and availability of data intensive network access that is emerging, the need for use of E-governance applications is on the increase. Interestingly, gathering and processing of vast amounts of data is not new to humanity. What is new is the speed at which one can process a complex data and extracting actionable business intelligence or big insight from data. Volume, Variety and Velocity are characteristics nature of big data that need careful choice of relevant technology and framework to handle. Big Data is therefore redefining the landscape of data management, from extract, transform, and load, or ETL processes to new technologies (such as Hadoop) for cleansing and organizing unstructured data in Big-Data applications, bringing up challenges of complexity, security, and risks as well as a need for new technology skills for analytics. In this paper, the model that illustrates how analytics of Big Data can result in the transformation of the government by increased efficiency and effectiveness in the e-governance service with citizen engagement in decision-making will be discussed.