The state of California has launched the first-ever statewide data warehouse focused on homelessness. In a press release, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said the data warehouse will “allow the state to make data-driven policy decisions in its efforts to prevent and end homelessness.”

The Tulsa, Okla., Board of Education is turning to voters to help fund school technology modernization. On April 5, the Board voted to hold a bond election on June 8 for voters to consider the $414 million 2021 Bond for Tulsa Public Schools. If passed, the funding would be doled out over the next five years.

Stanford University and the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) announced they were victimized by the Accellion data breach, joining a growing list of schools. Reports indicate the CLOP ransomware group contacted the universities and demanded $10 million in bitcoin or the attackers would publish the stolen data.

Focusing on diversity and inclusion in the cybersecurity space is “paramount” to protecting the United States against cyber risks, female cyber leaders said April 6 during the Women Leaders in Cybersecurity Webinar hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

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 […]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced that it has awarded the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) at The University of Texas at San Antonio a $1.2 million grant to launch a pilot program to help state, local, tribal, and territorial governments identify high value assets (HVA) in order to prioritize resources and planning.

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 […]

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., are introducing legislation that will provide up to $15 billion in matching grants to increase access to broadband services in areas of the United States that are unserved by broadband meeting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) minimum definition of that service.

(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 […]