As the ink is still drying – or its equivalent for a liquid crystal display screen – on the 12th edition of the House Government Operations Subcommittee’s Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) Scorecard, I pondered the question about whether and how the same measurement could be applied to state-level IT operations and progress.

Following a pair of votes on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act over the weekend, the bipartisan infrastructure measure is nearing the finish line in the Senate. The bill is currently on track for a final vote in the Senate on Tuesday morning.

There may be light at the end of the cyber-risk tunnel for state governments, but don’t look for it to appear soon. That was the sobering message from Commonwealth of Virginia CISO Mike Watson delivered on July 21 at FedInsider’s CyberThreats 2021 event.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) released a new primer to advance its business relationship management initiative. The Business Relationship Management and the New CIO Operating Model primer addresses how to develop mature vendor relationship management capabilities in state government.

The House of Representatives on July 20 voted to approve the State and Local Cybersecurity Improvement Act as part of a slate of cyber bills that passed under suspension of normal rules. The bill would create a $500 million-per-year grant program run by the Department of Homeland Security to help state and local governments improve their cybersecurity.

Recent hacks on localities’ water supply have shown the importance of cybersecurity in the water infrastructure. Witnesses sounded the alarm about water infrastructure cybersecurity and called for training and funding investments at a July 21 Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing.

The United States Military Academy at West Point (West Point) is searching for a cloud-based common application platform to collect application data and provide the information to open files on candidates applying to the school.

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.

There’s a long history in the higher reaches of the IT sphere of substantial cross-fertilization in the form of public sector CIOs moving across government levels, transferring among Federal, state and local jurisdictions, and then sometimes landing in the private sector.

For once, the biggest problem with engineering effective IT modernization may not boil down to a lack of money to tackle the job. That conclusion was a top-line takeaway from Republicans, Democrats, and private sector experts at a hearing of the House Government Operations Subcommittee hearing today on how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed state and local governments’ antiquated IT systems, and what governments should do about it now that pandemic conditions are easing in many areas.