Public sector organizations face a unique set of challenges when it comes to managing service delivery for both citizens and employees. Limited resources, tight budgets, and fragmented processes can make it difficult for these organizations to provide the quality of service that is expected of them – especially in a digital age where many residents […]

State and local governments want to embrace cloud services for the cost savings, flexibility, scalability, security, and improved customer experiences that they can bring. But the cloud brings challenges that are directly related to each of these benefits. For example, the pay-as-you-go cloud services model can deliver cost savings, but agencies need new processes in […]

Amid a rising tide of ransomware attacks against governments and schools nationwide accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, tech pros are prioritizing investments in core technologies to manage risk, including security and compliance, network infrastructure, and cloud computing. But implementation is hampered by dwindling resources and access to personnel training, according to a new survey by SolarWinds. The […]

The collective efforts of the past year to assist with vaccine distribution, expansion of last-mile delivery services, and a boom in digital software are just glimpses of the technologies that will soon enable smart cities around the world. One estimate predicted that upwards of $124 billion would be spent worldwide on smart city initiatives in […]

Before the pandemic, 16.9 million kids fell into what was dubbed the “homework gap.” Essentially, these students had access to the internet and the educational resources it affords while in class but not when at home. Many were forced to use Wi-Fi at fast-food restaurants or rely on the library to do their schoolwork. In […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned historic levels of fraud in state government unemployment insurance (UI) programs – enabled through combined failures of policy, procedure, management, leadership, and technology. The pandemic fraud-wave has resulted in perhaps the greatest financial debacle in state governance history – wasting as much as $30 billion in California alone. Nationwide on […]

It had to be good news for IT-challenged states when President Biden last week signed the $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill that includes a somewhat surprising $2 billion funding award to the Department of Labor (DoL) to help with state unemployment insurance (UI) program improvement. The plan’s UI package was first reported by MeriTalk on […]

With many states admitting to substantial fraudulent payments due to poor management and problematic unemployment insurance (UI) application systems, what are they doing about fraud in other state programs that collectively make up another giant elephant in the room? While California alone has admitted to processing over $11 billion in fraudulent UI claims in the […]

(Editor’s note: John Thomas Flynn was California state CIO from 1995-99.) If you live in California, you probably already know the story of the state government unemployment insurance (UI) system’s performance debacle over the past year. And if you live elsewhere – and the story got lost in the avalanche of pandemic-driven bad news over […]

Since 1920, the State of New Hampshire has held its presidential primary elections before any other state, making it a critical first step on the road to the White House. New Hampshire marks the centennial of its first-in-the-nation presidential primary on February 11, 2020. In the last 100 years, government officials and constituents have witnessed […]