Frozen in place by isolated IT management systems and spreadsheets for cataloging data, public sector technology buyers are now stepping out of the cold.

The Howard County, Md., government streamlined its IT operations and cut its contract approval times to a fraction of what they were by building out workflows and bundling business processes on a cloud platform, said Howard County’s Deputy CIO Tom Yeatts.

Witnesses at a Senate Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet subcommittee hearing about mobile apps on Tuesday pressed senators for action on making more spectrum available for 5G and other services.

The Tennessee Department of Human Services (DHS) tackled a customer service dilemma that had reached critical mass by implementing a new customer service management (CSM) solution, and came out of the ordeal with lower customer wait times, a renewed and energized staff, and a demonstrably strong value proposition to satisfy the bottom-line demands of the state’s Federal funders and support a statewide service rollout.

The State of Washington’s Department of Health (DOH) implemented more than 600 improvements to its cloud IT service management implementation in 2017, which helped cut the department’s IT service delivery times in half, according to two officials within the department.

The State of Ohio has established a governance model to better support IT optimization initiatives, due in large part to its success adopting new cloud platforms across agencies and dumping antiquated, siloed systems, said Renee Evans, enterprise service management administrator for Ohio’s Office of Information Technology (OIT).

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on May 10 approved a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that could supply more spectrum to commercial carriers to provide 5G wireless services.

A new study finds that the public is warming up to the use of biometric identification technology, but remains wary of tracking applications and is looking to government to set standards in that area.

The nature of work–the jobs performed and the cross-departmental collaboration required to get them done–has not changed much in the past two decades, but the means to perform those jobs can be revolutionized in the next three to five years, said John Donahoe, president and CEO of cloud platform provider ServiceNow.

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced last Thursday that the agency is awarding a $2.9 million grant to fund e-Connectivity investments in rural Marion County, Ala.