IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

“This is a very important issue and the reason we’re doing it is because... cyber-crime, online identity theft and theft of intellectual property have been significant challenges for national security, public safety and economic prosperity,” said a senior administration official from the White House during a conference call with the press. He noted that cyber-crime has increased dramatically over the last decade and as a result President Barack Obama has called cyber-security one of the most serious economic and national security challenges.

A vocal minority of government and civic activists say open data is the future, but the public is largely unconcerned.

Every day there’s a new initiative, portal or project that intends to transform the life of a city’s residents using the power of data. Just yesterday, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $42 million initiative to incubate open data projects in 100 mid-sized cities. But a unique report published by the Pew Research Center on April 21 shows that the public’s awareness and enthusiasm for open data does not match that of government’s.

A vocal minority of government and civic activists say open data is the future, but the public is largely unconcerned.

Every day there’s a new initiative, portal or project that intends to transform the life of a city’s residents using the power of data. Just yesterday, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $42 million initiative to incubate open data projects in 100 mid-sized cities. But a unique report published by the Pew Research Center on April 21 shows that the public’s awareness and enthusiasm for open data does not match that of government’s.

The act also established “FirstNet”, an independent authority within NTIA, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. NTIA is an agency of the Department of Commerce.

FirstNet issued a “recruitment prospectus” for its 15-member Board of Directors on Tuesday, May 22. The Homeland Security Secretary, U.S. Attorney General and Office of Management and Budget director will all occupy permanent seats as board members.

To some geeks in government, Google’s 2009 defeat of Microsoft to run e-mail for Los Angeles was akin to Luke Skywalker’s blow to the Empire in Star Wars. By October 2010, Microsoft struck back, signing an e-mail contract with New York City, moving 100,000 public servants to its cloud. In 2011, San Francisco also took e-mail to Microsoft’s cloud and Wyoming became the first state to use the Google Apps for Government suite. These are just a few of the higher-profile examples.

A report published this past December by JASON--an independent group of scientists that advises the U.S. government on science and technology--states that the ultimate goal in healthcare is to achieve an "agile, national-scale 'Learning Health System' for identifying and sharing effective practices of care."

The organization's previous reports called for building a robust infrastructure, saying that Meaningful Use Stage 3 should embrace interoperability at its core as a basis for that learning system.

This past spring, things were looking bright: The states were closer to finally getting the OK to collect sales taxes from online purchases. By a comfortable bipartisan margin, the U.S. Senate had passed the Marketplace Fairness Act and the House had overcome a major hurdle when House Judiciary committee members agreed that the bill did not represent a new tax. Then came November. House Speaker John Boehner pronounced the Senate version of the act all but dead. The speaker, a spokesman announced, "has significant concerns about the bill, and it won't move forward this year."

After I was appointed as the Director of the Office of Technology Services in 2012, I met with all of our major customers to ask what services we weren’t providing that they would like to see us provide. Cloud services was the number one response, so my challenge was how to implement it.

Some of the key attributes of cloud services included resources on demand, scalability (both up and down), self-provisioning, high degrees of automation, standardization, and virtualization. All of these attributes are things that are challenging in a government environment. For example, we have an 18-month budget cycle and a six- to eight-month procurement timeframe for large IT procurements. This was going to make resources on demand difficult to implement.

That's in part why the administration recently launched the new U.S. Digital Service, whose first project -- a “playbook” of best practices for transforming digital services -- is prodding agencies thinking about revamping their online offerings to first “understand what people need.”

Government Technology caught up with Benny Chacko, CIO of the Los Angeles County Probation Department, who discussed the importance of understanding your agency’s unique business needs and thinking beyond technology.

Understanding the more technical aspects of the job of a public-sector IT professional is just the beginning. Modern CIOs bring a very diverse set of backgrounds — educational and professional — to their positions, and the agencies they work for reap the benefits. CIO Benny Chacko, of the Los Angeles County Probation Department, supplemented his bachelor’s degree in computer science with an MBA in finance to broaden his skill set, and had a number of private-sector jobs before joining the county workforce. We caught up with Chacko recently at the Los Angeles Digital Government Summit, where he talked about the importance of understanding your agency’s unique business needs and thinking beyond technology.

New methods of financing can open up much needed investment in infrastructure.

In industrial facilities, the importance of preventive maintenance is well-understood. Sure, you could save a few bucks by skipping scheduled part inspections and replacements — but those parts would break sooner as a result, putting an expensive dent in your factory’s output. Instead of sparing the oil can, plant managers know it’s better to invest upfront, and keep their machinery in prime condition.

Data analytics tools can help make transportation systems and city life more efficient.

Being able to accurately assess public transportation ridership and vehicular traffic is more important to cities now than ever in the recent past as transit volumes in cities plummet due to social distancing.

State and local governments have made significant improvements in how they use the Web to serve citizens. The Center for Digital Government has been highlighting the best websites for 18 years and describes last year's winning sites as "first-class" in terms of service delivery, productivity and performance.

Laziness, carelessness, stupidity, ignorance, naiveté — what do all these have in common? They’re all reasons passwords don’t work and also the reasons we’re still using passwords. People and corporations, small businesses and government agencies, by and large everyone is too lazy to do what’s right when it comes to passwords because what’s right is a pain in the ass. Of course, getting hacked is much, much worse, but that’s where naiveté factors in — it won’t happen to me.

According to the survey, conducted by WebMD and its Medscape subsidiary and unveiled this week at Health 2.0, almost half of the participants would consider using a smartphone for such tests as eye and ear examinations instead of visiting a doctor. But only about a third of doctors would replace the office visit with those tests.

What’s the difference between a “good” state for telemedicine and a “bad” one?

The American Telemedicine Association released two reports at its annual conference earlier this month in Los Angeles, a state-by state analysis of coverage and reimbursement policies for telemedicine services and another on physician practice standards and licensure in each state.

In terms of coverage and reimbursement, New Mexico was one of five states — six including the District of Columbia — to receive an “A” from the trade association, based on 13 metrics. The Land of Enchantment ranks fifth in total area but 36th in terms of population, meaning that there are vast, sparsely populated regions, making the state a good candidate for remote healthcare services.

For Fresno CIO Carolyn Hogg, the answer has to do with olive trees as wireless subscribers, tracking tomatoes from vine to dinner plate, self-driving tractors, and agricultural research and education that could boost the state’s economy and help feed the world. Hogg, along with a coalition of federal, state, private-sector and local interests, are working to secure high-speed wireless broadband to take the region’s agriculture, health care and education to the next level.

How will the FirstNet nationwide public safety network impact state CIOs? That was key topic for day two of the NASCIO Annual Conference here on Tuesday. Here’s a rundown of some of the issues addressed and why the government shutdown didn’t prevent federal representatives from attending.

Telemedicine – the use of IT to provide clinical healthcare at a distance -- and my field, telepathology or digital pathology (pathology at a distance, driven by telecom and IT), seek to tap talent and technologies wherever they may be. Via the cloud, we have begun to expand the reach of every pathologist beyond his or her backyard to patients and practices the world over, whether performing diagnoses, engaging in education or embarking on research. This is visionary medicine at its best, at work to transform patient care and save lives on an unprecedented scale.

Solano County in Northern California will soon become the home for a 'built from the ground up city' created by tech billionaires like venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Mark Andreessen, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, among others. This area is near Travis Air Force Base, and when thousands of acres were bought in this area, the buyers were doing it secretly.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, the project is called California Forever, and the group's website, California Forever, shows rolling hills and towns, waterfront villas, and a village square. It will be built on 50,000 acres of agricultural land.