The Coast Guard has decades of data it has collected but has done a poor job making use of it, the service’s commandant said on Wednesday.
The Coast Guard has developed its governance structures for information technology and is “moving forward in a good way there” but, “We have not valued our data,” Adm. Linda Fagan said at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution.
Fagan said the data sits in stove piped databases that are difficult to access and analyze for patterns because it lacks governance structures. Without these structures, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that exist now don’t do the service any good with its databases, she said.
Shortly after becoming the service’s commandant on June 1, 2022, the Coast Guard stood up an Office of Data and Analytics and is “now the area that we’re focusing on,” Fagan said.
The Coast Guard has been doing counter-narcotics operations in the Eastern Pacific for more than 30 years and has data on the location of every interdiction it has done in the region, she said.
“Yet, the ability to analyze 20- or 30-years worth of data and then begin to predict where you might find the next encounter based on time of day, location, we’re not yet able to do that because we’ve got to do what I call the unfun governance work around data right now,” she said.