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Fairfax pursues countywide data architecture: cloud analytics, governance and AI pilots
Summary
IT leaders described a countywide data strategy emphasizing cloud analytics, data governance, data stewards, and AI/machine-learning pilots; the county stores roughly 12 petabytes of data and officials urged integration to reduce silos and support a future customer portal.
Fairfax County IT and analytics leaders told the Technology Committee they are building a countywide data architecture to support a single customer portal and better cross-agency decision-making.
Gregory Scott, director of IT, said the county stores about 12 petabytes of data and is moving more analytics into cloud-based lakehouse architectures to use advanced tools while maintaining security. Maura Power (DIT) and Michelle Gregory (Department of Management and Budget) stressed the need for enterprise data classification, data stewards in each agency, and consistent metadata so data can be reused to measure progress on the county’s strategic plan and the 1 Fairfax equity initiative.
Panelists said the county is already piloting machine-learning and generative-AI projects with public-safety and health partners, and emphasized rigorous security reviews and compliance checks before analytic workloads go live. Marcus Thornton, Deputy Chief Data Officer for the Commonwealth, urged a focus on data quality—"garbage in, garbage out"—and encouraged Fairfax to tap state open-data resources where useful.
Board members pressed for clarity on what data can be shared between agencies and how privacy and PII are protected; IT staff said they run architecture and compliance reviews, use encryption and role-based access controls, and will continue closed briefings with individual board offices for sensitive topics.
