Location-based services, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and a better user experience. These are features the government has promised in the revamped version of Karnataka’s flagship mobile governance platform, Mobile One.
The Karnataka Mobile One was launched by then President Pranab Mukherjee in December 2014 and was hailed as India’s first and the world’s largest multi-mode mobile government platform offering over 4,500 services.
The platform, however, came with its share of glitches, which led to stagnation in use. Also, users found the platform outdated when compared to private payments services offered by the likes of PayTM. This forced authorities to take a relook at the MobileOne platform.
“The app has been totally rebuilt with simpler workflows.
Read full story at Deccan Herald…
first published week of: 08/06/2018
A year and a half into the Trump administration, Grant Schneider can remove the “acting” label from his title.
Schneider, who has served as acting Federal Chief Information Security Officer since January 2017, has been tapped for the role on a full-time basis, the White House announced July 19. The job is housed at the Office of Management and Budget.
Schneider is just the second individual to hold the federal CISO job, which was created under the Obama administration's Cybersecurity National Action Plan. Former Department of Homeland Security official and Air Force brigadier general Greg Touhill was the first federal CISO. Schneider served as Touhill's deputy.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 07/23/2018
Kelly Olson will take on the role of acting director of the TTS, following the departure of Joann Collins Smee.
The General Services Administration has a new leader of its Technology Transformation Service.
On Aug. 22, the GSA confirmed that current TTS Chief of Staff Kelly Olson will take on the role of acting director of the TTS, following the departure of Joann Collins Smee, according to multiple reports. Olson will also take on the role of deputy commissioner of the GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, the agency confirmed to Nextgov. A GSA spokesperson told FCW that Olson’s first day in both the TTS and FAS jobs would be on Aug. 27.
Olson, who has been at the GSA since 2015, previously served as director of the agency’s innovation portfolio and strategic initiatives, managing several programs, such as Challenge.gov, Digital.gov and the Emerging Citizen Technology Office, among others, according to FedScoop.
Read full story at FedTech…
first published week of: 08/27/2018
A new report ranked the 55 most populous urban areas in the United States based on how secure individuals are while using technology in those cities. The most secure city was Richmond, Va.; the least secure was Las Vegas, Nev.
The report from cybersecurity provider Coronet, titled “Cybersecurity in the City: Ranking America’s Most Insecure Metros,” specifically examined the cyber readiness of mid-market companies in the selected cities. A city receiving a higher score means people working for businesses there have a higher likelihood of their data being exposed, explained Coronet Chief Security Officer Dror Liwer.
Higher scores don’t necessarily mean there are issues with specific networks in these cities, but that the city is subject to greater numbers of malicious threats. “It's important to understand it's not about mistakes on the infrastructure side, it's about malicious actors,” Liwer said.
Coronet used a risk index ranging from 0 (most secure) to 10 (least secure). The data it used for the analysis came from just over 1 million endpoints the company monitors at the device, network and cloud level. Device vulnerabilities include missing or outdated firewalls or antivirus software, lack of password protection or lax user account management, or unsupported operating systems. The study also scanned Wi-Fi and cellular networks for threats, attackers and vulnerabilities as well as misconfigurations.
Read full story at GCN…
first published week of: 06/04/2018
When it comes to technology, state governments invest the most in people.
That’s the finding of a survey the Center for Digital Government* conducted recently, combining responses from 48 state governments. The Digital States Survey asked all participants to estimate what percentage of their IT budgets went into seven categories, and the No. 1 expenditure area was internal IT staff — states reported that fully one-third of their IT budgets are spent there.
IT services represented the next biggest slice, with about one-quarter of state IT budgets going toward solutions, cloud and infrastructure services. Hardware and software together accounted for 22 percent of spending.
Read full story at Govtech.com…
first published week of: 10/29/2018
My trip to the United States to participate in the Esri User Conference in July was very fruitful. The five-day conference showcased new geographic information system (GlS) applications for 18,000 GIS users around the world. Some countries are taking advantage of information technology to gap-jump their development, which is very impressive.
For example, when we talked about the Middle East in the past, it was often just oil and the desert. Not anymore. When we met the female custodian of Dubai’s IT policy at the Esri conference last year, she talked about how the emirate was shaping a Smart Dubai, which totally subverted the people’s common impression of the region.
This year I met another outstanding Middle East woman at the conference: H.E. Dr. Rauda Saeed Al Saadi from Abu Dhabi. She is the director general of Smart Solutions and Services Authority (ADSSSA).
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates, the second largest city in this rich country. It has a population of nearly three million.
The ADSSSA is responsible for assisting various government departments to upgrade their services through information technology. The authority drafts policies,formulatesstrategies, and provides operational support to achieve government integration of information and communication technologies. Its recent key project is to build a Smart Geospatial Contact Center.
It is the world’s first full-service platform that gathers all government big data, geographic information, machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide quality, fast and people-oriented services. For example, when a citizen has an urgent need and calls for help, the contact center can quickly locate the citizen and make the support service more readily available.
Read full story at ejinsight.com…
first published week of: 08/27/2018
Automation tools help agencies secure multiple cloud environments and dynamically respond to threats.
The Defense Department’s new Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which would move the DOD’s entire cloud ecosystem to a single public cloud provider, has attracted significant attention in recent weeks.
At first glance, consolidating multiple clouds seems like a good idea that would streamline services. However, for an organization as large as the DOD, with tens of thousands of applications, millions of endpoint devices and an incredibly diverse and challenging operation environment, a single cloud is not a realistic path forward.
Instead, government agencies should be investing in a multicloud strategy that leverages the strengths of both public and private clouds to achieve better security, flexibility and cost savings for the American taxpayer.
Read full story at FedTech…
first published week of: 06/25/2018
An accurate census count is critical for state and local governments. It affects the number of seats a state has in the U.S. House of Representatives and helps determine how $590 billion of federal funding is spent on infrastructure, hospitals and schools. But getting an accurate count can be tricky, especially in the wake of a disaster that relocates residents, rent increases that foster more creative housing arrangements or a housing boom that fuels new developments.
To ensure it has an accurate list of addresses to work from, the Census Bureau enlists the help of state and local governments to update the addresses it has on file. Its Local Update of Census Addresses program is open to all 39,139 tribal, state and local governments that can use LUCA to compare their local housing data with Census’ and make additions, corrections or deletions to the addresses on the lists and maps the bureau uses to conduct the decennial census.
Before comparing files, participants can use other Census tools to standardize and collect data. The Census Geocoder is an address lookup tool that converts addresses to an approximate latitude and longitude based on the ranges in the Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) shapefiles. Governments can enter up to 10,000 addresses at once and receive information about state, county, tract and block codes for those addresses in a matter of minutes.
Read full story at GCN…
first published week of: 02/19/2018
Johnson Joy, CIO of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, resigned in the early morning of March 20, according to an agency official.
Chad Cowan, the chief of staff to the deputy secretary, will temporarily serve as the acting CIO. Cowan is a public relations specialist who left communications firm Burson-Marsteller to join HUD last August.
Joy left amid an investigation by the Guardian newspaper into potential corruption and retaliation at HUD.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 03/26/2018
David C. Chow is the new CIO at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency confirmed to FCW. He replaces Chad Cowan, who had been serving as acting CIO.
According to public-facing federal databases, Chow spent about eight years in a senior program management role at the National Credit Union Administration before joining HUD.
The previous permanent CIO at HUD, Johnson Joy, resigned in March 2018 after a press reports linked him to a nonprofit charity that may have improperly endorsed Donald Trump's presidential campaign and collected donations without performing charitable works.
HUD is slated to spend $400 million on IT in FY2018. The agency's FY2019 budget request has that figure dropping to $300 million for 2019.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 09/03/2018