Better data and guidance can help states reinvest more than $800 million from fiscal year (FY) 2015-2019 in adoption savings – the result of 2008 legislation to increase Federal reimbursement of state assistance payments to adoptive families.
The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) released a new report that makes the case for insight enabling analytics. NASCIO explains that as data analytics increasingly plays a role in service delivery for states, state CIOs are often taking the lead in these efforts.
In a move to improve the city’s transparency, Los Angeles City (L.A.) Controller Ron Galperin has released Inside L.A. City Finance, a new online dashboard that tracks the city’s financial information in real time.
Republican members of Congress have written separate letters to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressing concerns about the companies’ collection of data on students, among other issues.
While legislation from 2018 sought to have the Social Security Administration (SSA) enter into agreements with states to share and match SSA and child welfare data, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) survey has found that some state child welfare agencies are identifing challenges to participating in these data exchanges.
The Department of Labor (DOL) – and numerous state governments that the agency assists – struggled during the coronavirus pandemic to ramp up unemployment insurance (UI) programs to meet sharp increases in demand. Some of the principal culprits, according to DOL’s inspector general (IG), were legacy systems, insufficient staffing resources to manage increased unemployment claims, and unclear and untimely Employment and Training Administration (ETA) guidance.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced the creation of two statewide dashboards that should show how the state is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and make more state-wide health equity available to residents.
The Biden Administration has gone to work on stopping the spread of the COVID-19 virus through executive orders (EO) that will enhance data collection capabilities among relevant industries and establish a national testing strategy that includes a contact tracing element.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is launching a new initiative to invest $25 million in research projects dedicated to foundational data science principles.
Data can come in many forms – census data, tax information, even video footage – but whether data is structured in a spreadsheet or unstructured in myriad other forms used to be the key determinant in what insights could be drawn from it. Not anymore.
