state and local

The nation’s roads are up for sale. But who should have control over them?
State and local governments are in desperate need of cash for all manner of road, building and bridge repair, and are increasingly turning to private money for funding.

With the deadline just days away for states to declare whether they will institute their own health insurance exchanges as outlined in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), many states in the U.S. have yet to formally declare their intentions. Their delay is only one factor threatening to slow down progress on an already rough-hewn path to implementation of health exchanges, which are scheduled to be fully operational with policies taking effect in January 2014.

The state exchanges are a marketplace for health insurance products where, in theory, consumers and small businesses can shop for insurance at competitive rates, enroll in plans and find transparent information on premiums, coverage, and benefits. Exchanges are familiar to any consumer who has experienced the ease of buying airline tickets online using aggregator services, such as Expedia. However, buying health insurance is not the same as buying an airline ticket from Chicago to New York. The stakes are much higher; the issues, more complex. It is not a matter of two double clicks and you’re done. Keep reading →


From background checks on truck drivers to renewing hunting licenses in Mississippi, eGovernment portals are taking consumers directly to government services through a “self-pay” fee system without either state or federal appropriations or expenditures.

For example, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has instituted a background check system that bypasses bureaucracy and delivers information directly to trucking companies. Keep reading →

The federal government’s vast collection of searchable data has begun to feature information from city databases as part of the effort to increase transparency, promote efficiency and spur innovation.

Now, city officials and developers will work together to help improve the information available to city residents via the new ‘Cities’ Community as part of Data.gov. Databases are currently available for Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, according to Jeanne Holm, GSA’s data.gov evangelist. Next up: Santa Cruz, Calif., Louisville and Atlanta. Keep reading →


When it comes to forecasting the spending by state and local governments on technology goods and services, it pays not to let the trees block your view of the forest. That’s why it’s important to look at the broader statistical average of activity as determined by tens of thousands of elected and appointed decision makers.

Consider the components of this far-flung market: Keep reading →

Government agencies are savings billions of dollars from virtualization; and those savings are projected to grow as workloads in virtualized server and desktop environments are expected to double by 2015. But agencies must overcome funding uncertainties, concerns about legacy systems and other barriers to achieve virtualization’s full potential, according to a new industry survey of government IT executives.

The new study found that 82% of federal and 77% of state-and-local IT professionals say their agencies have already implemented some degree of server virtualization, where computing work is done in artificially-created, software-controlled work spaces. Keep reading →