The Center for Digital Government (CDG) announced the 2017 Digital Cities Survey Winners. The Digital Cities Survey, now in its 17th year, seeks to recognize cities that are using technology to improve the citizen experience, increase government transparency, and encourage citizen engagement with the government.

For the first time a majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Increased urbanization brings new demands for technology to make city life more pleasant, healthy, and efficient. New low-cost sensors and advanced data analytics, among other technologies, have given rise to smart cities across the United States. However, many cities are struggling with how to best select, deploy, and maintain smart city technologies. In its recent report, the Center for Data Innovation (CDI) said that national governments have an important role to play in accelerating and coordinating smart city development.

TJ Kennedy will leave his role as president of FirstNet at the end of the year. Kennedy has been with FirstNet, the Federal organization tasked with establishing a nationwide network for public safety and first responders, for more than four years.

A month after experiencing catastrophic devastation due to Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover. With 48 percent of cell sites still out of service, residents and officials struggle to communicate across the island. To help get residents connected again AT&T deployed its Flying Cell on Wings (COW) for the first time.

The Sunlight Foundation released a report that found that cities use Federal data to make strategic decisions including identifying local issues and informing policy decisions. The majority of cities began using Federal data more than a decade ago and 43 percent plan to increase their use of Federal data in the future.

With a desire to improve cross-agency communication and streamline IT service delivery, Ohio turned to ServiceNow for an enterprise IT service management tool.

Ahead of its annual conference Oct. 1-4 in Austin, Texas, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, along with the National Association of State Procurement Officials, released a road map advocating for state IT procurement reform.

Systems integration and exploring new functionality are two major technological challenges for states pursuing their own health care initiatives, according to Jim Hardy, Deloitte Consulting’s Medicaid advisory services lead.

A bill proposed in the Florida legislature would take away the authority of the Agency for State Technology to oversee statewide IT projects, which could ultimately drive up costs, according to Eric Larson, chief technology officer at AST.

The Government Accountability Office this month released a report indicating that the Department of Veterans Affairs had made limited progress to improve its health care since being added to the high-risk list in 2015. This limited progress led GAO to keep the VA health care system on the 2017 list for concerns over timeliness, quality, and safety of veterans’ health care.