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Dean Gialamas, a familiar face in Southern California IT circles, has been tapped as the next IT bureau chief and CIO for the Los Angeles Police Department.
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The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services has had a busy year responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and the state's historic wildfires, but one of its most expensive purchases of IT goods in 2020 is related to an ongoing modernization.
Sacramento County will receive $3.1 million, and the city will get a reported $950,000. The University of California Regents will receive $13.1 million and California State University will receive $2.9 million from the settlement, in which the carriers denied wrongdoing.
Lemming has experience in both the public and private sectors, having served as senior director of IT for the El Dorado County Office of Education. His affiliations in the private sector include Apple, Riverside Technologies and, most recently, CommScope.
The awards recognize the achievements and best practices of states, cities and counties that are radically improving the experience of government and pushing the boundaries of how citizen services are delivered.
Ajay Awatramani, who has an extensive history in product management, will spearhead product strategy, management and design in his new leadership role at Cornerstone.
No more than one in 1,000 callers per day have reached someone at the number the Employment Development Department has told people to call for help with their claims, leaving callers “without a statistically significant chance of being served,” according to a new report.
The idea is that chatbots, which typically use some form of AI algorithm, can handle common questions and leave less common or more complicated questions for human staff to answer. They’ve made inroads in, among other places, Placer and San Joaquin counties.
The innovation office seeks to raise the standards for state government websites in user experience, including applications and design. Two of the roles are full time and two are part time.
Tara Moran is the first chief executive for the new California Water Data Consortium, which seeks to improve and share data in a way that helps the state manage its liquid assets. The organization’s goal, she says, is to create a strong, data-related foundation to support water policy discussions in the state.
At its second meeting since an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom directed it to create a new State Broadband Action Plan by year’s end, the California Broadband Council approved the outline of what will be in that plan.
Topics for the free webinar include “Current Cyber Threat Landscape,” “Weaponizing End Users,” “Ransomware and Why it Works,” “Why Implement Cyber Policies and Training,” “Protecting the Citizen at Home, Remote Work and Mobile,” “COVID-19 Cyber Scams,” “Election Subversion, Defamation, and Disruption Strategies of Hackers and Nation States,” and “Securing Remote Connections.”
Before beginning his new role with Microsoft this week, the Sacramento-area resident held a variety of sales and executive positions, including with Oracle, Natoma Technologies and CGI.
The program, capitalized with $787,650 in Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds, is aimed at providing new job skills to 40 people impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg emphasized the impact it could have on a larger scale in the city, if expanded.
The state may already be building tools to help the Employment Development Department improve its response to residents' claims, but there are other takeaways of interest to technology vendors in a Strike Team's report Saturday on how the department can do more for residents.
The CTBO leads seven major IT support areas: Architecture Development; Enterprise Analytics and Data Services; Information Management; Program Management and Support Services; Portfolio and Workload Management Services; IT Management Services; and Enterprise Service Management.
In the first half of 2020, OTA’s five largest purchases included headsets (with microphones), color copier, computer equipment, help desk licensing, and technology to track network users’ devices.
The state is already building tools to help the Employment Development Department improve its response to unemployment claims, but a Strike Team is recommending “rethinking the state’s plans for the Benefit Systems Modernization (BSM)” and pausing claims applications for two weeks — the latter of which began Saturday.
Techwire is pleased to welcome Medallia to the Techwire family. Medallia’s cloud platform is used by hundreds of the world’s largest organizations and leading federal agencies, which trust Medallia to help them capture customer and employee feedback, understand it in real time, and deliver insights and action everywhere. In addition, Medallia has solutions for state and local governments that help innovate at the pace of change, create a dialog with the public and help constituents engage with elected officials. For more information, visit Medallia.com or contact Paul Danielson.
The data, from the Financial Information System for California, covers spending on IT goods as reported by the Department of Social Services from Jan. 1 to June 30.
The position requires expertise in designing and monitoring cloud and virtual environments, as well as working with vendors and recommending solutions for the department.
“In many ways, it has never been easier to implement digital services. Our partners within the city are finding it much easier to think about small, iterative services that improve over time. In less wild times, we likely wouldn’t have put these services live in their current state.”
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Insights from Prodigy Consulting on preparing Microsoft 365 environments for Copilot through data governance, user training and change management.
Forrester just published The Forrester Wave — Cloud Native Application Protection Solutions, an independent evaluation of 14 vendors in the CNAPP market. Wiz was named the Leader and received the highest score!
Technological innovation in artificial intelligence has shifted. For the better part of a decade, AI operated within tightly bounded constraints: classifying images, generating text, and using these capabilities to surface recommendations. While these systems were powerful, they were fundamentally passive. They needed to receive a prompt in order to return a result. Once the result was achieved, the system stopped.
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