Services for Microsoft Stimulus360

Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) has awarded a contract to provide installation, configuration, implementation and training services for Microsoft Stimulus360. Stimulus360 is the Microsoft solution that helps public sector agencies track, measure, and share information about federal stimulus programs. Working with subcontractor partner Information Strategies, Inc., Infinite Group will deliver an enterprise virtual-hosted environment for the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration (DFA), who will use Stimulus360 to comply with a number of requirements for receiving and dispersing funding received via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) enacted by Congress on February 17, 2009.

Language in Pennsylvania

Language Services Associates (LSA) has been awarded a one-year contract by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to provide Over-the-Phone Interpretation (OPI) and Document Translation, Web Site Localization services. The contract, formerly managed by Language Line, offers three one-year extensions and has an anticipated value of $4 million per year. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.5% of the U.S. population, and an estimated 1,080,279 Pennsylvania residents, speak a language other than English at home.

Voice services for New York

New York State Office of the Chief Information Officer/Office for Technology (CIO/OFT) has selected PAETEC to deliver core voice services to the State agencies on the State’s network. The agreement will represent over six million minutes per month in voice services, distributed between local and long distance service.

CIO/OFT provides statewide technology direction and centralized technology policies and services to New York State government entities. The agency’s voice and data telecommunication systems support over 90,000 users and 10,000 teleconferences per year. The local and long distance (toll) services provided from PAETEC are expected to save the state approximately $370,000 annually for the next five years, representing a 20 percent cost savings. (Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, New York State Chief Information Officer and Director of the Office for Technology.)

Virtualization services to state agencies

Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) has awarded Infinite Group a three-year contract to deliver virtualization services to state agencies. Under terms of the agreement, various Mississippi state agencies can engage Infinite Group to virtualize servers and migrate applications into ITS’ virtual data center environments, housed in the State Data Center facilities. Infinite Group will manage and implement server consolidations that will migrate physical servers to virtual machines, using VMware vSphere technology – reducing the number of physical servers, with resulting benefits in both physical footprint and energy savings.

Hawaii community solution to youth programs

The State of Hawaii has awarded nFocus Software a contract to deploy its community solution to youth programs. nFocus Software will implement a data collection and information management system this summer in the Hawaii Department of Defense’s About Face program, which provides positive youth development outreach to at-risk youth. The About Face program provides services to over a thousand young people in 25 sites throughout Hawaii. As the chosen community solution, nFocus Software’s TraxSolutions participant management software will allow the About Face program to standardize and centralize data collection from multiple service providers. (Wayne Kanemoto, Hawaii’s project officer for the State of Hawaii Department of Defense.)

$62.8 million contract by the California Department of Motor Vehicles

L-1 Identity Solutions has been awarded a five-year $62.8 million contract by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to continue providing secure driver’s license solutions. Two two-year extensions are options for the State and if exercised would add an additional $45.8 million to the contract’s value. The contract includes new workflow processes and technologies to further improve the integrity of the issuance process and security of the card. (George Valverde, Director of California Department of Motor Vehicles.)

$1.3 million on education communication network

INX Inc has been awarded a $1.3 million contract by The State of New Mexico’s Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) to implement an education communication network. The project will improve remote access to educational resources and connectivity to other educational entities. INX will design, implement, and maintain the communication network. (Jean Rightley, Superintendent of Education at CYFD.)

TexasOnline 2.0

The state of Texas has signed a new seven-year contract with Texas NICUSA, LLC to manage TexasOnline 2.0 (www.texasonline.com), the official government portal for the state of Texas. TexasOnline currently offers more than 850 services to 2.4 million visitors every month and has processed $12 billion in transactions since inception in 2000. The new contract calls for maintaining these services and enhancing TexasOnline with new services and “next-generation” Web design and Web 2.0 tools to give citizens easier access to government services. (Brian Rawson, executive director of DIR and the State’s Chief Technology Officer.)

$1.75 million communication infrastructure upgrade

INX has been awarded a $1.75 million dollar contract from the Washington State Department of Ecology for a communication infrastructure upgrade. Washington State Department of Ecology ("Ecology") has awarded INX the contract to develop and design a new communications network. The network design is based on Cisco technology and Nexus Switches at the core to provide high-availability and redundancy to the network as well as a high level of resiliency at the edge. (Jim French, Ecology Network Manager said Washington State Department of Ecology.)

Newborn Hearing Screening Data Management

Natus Medical has been awarded a contract to provide its Newborn Hearing Screening Data Management Service to the California Department of Health Care Services. Natus will provide web-based software designed by its Neometrics division to all birthing hospitals in California and the state’s Hearing Coordination Centers. The contracted service will assist users in managing hearing screening data and provide training, tracking, and monitoring capabilities to ensure infants with hearing loss are linked with appropriate treatment and services. www.natus.com.

$250,000 monitoring and control project

State Government owned Maryland Public Television (“MPT”) has awarded Statmon Technologies their transmission systems monitoring and control project valued at approximately $250,000. The project encompasses seven transmission sites and one uplink facility at various locations across the State of Maryland as well as a Network Operations Center located in the Maryland Public Television facilities.

Oregon architectural and engineering services

Black & Veatch was selected by the state of Oregon to provide architectural and engineering services for the Oregon Wireless Interoperability Network (OWIN) project that is designed to enhance public safety. The OWIN project consolidates the Department of Oregon State Police, Department of Corrections, Department of Forestry and Department of Transportation radio systems into an up-to-date wireless public safety network. The system will replace outdated and aging infrastructure while complying with new Federal Communications Commission regulations requiring users of wideband radio to convert to narrowband technology before Jan. 1, 2013. (OWIN Director, Lindsay Ball.)

$1 billion of unclaimed property

Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. has been awarded a contract from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts to increase the amount of unclaimed property the state returns to its rightful owners. To support the Comptroller’s mission of finding the owners of more than $1 billion in property, the ACS Unclaimed Property Clearinghouse will provide the state with management and program direction, specialized services to locate property owners, as well as supplemental claims processing and call center services under the competitively bid contract. The unclaimed assets include payroll checks, utility deposits, bank accounts, safe deposit box contents and insurance proceeds.

The work of ACS touches millions of people every day. ACS processes more than half of the nation’s child support payments; manages 24 electronic payment card programs for state and federal clients, disbursing government payments and benefits; processes nearly 570 million Medicaid claims each year totaling more than $50 billion in provider payments; saves state child care programs millions of dollars; and services student loans for more than 11 million borrowers.

$16m in driver’s license solutions

L-1 Identity Solutions has been awarded contracts and contract extensions from Delaware, Louisiana, Tennessee, Indiana and a State to be named at a later date, to continue providing secure driver’s license solutions, bringing the total value of these contracts to $27.6 million. Extension options in the yet-to-be-named State would add an additional $16 million. All of the awards were made to the Secure Credentialing Division of L-1. www.L1ID.com.

Construction permits

Avolve Software Corporation, developers of ProjectDox ePlan and collaboration software and a leading provider of ePlan solutions for cities, counties and states nationwide, announced today that West Palm Beach, Florida, ranked as a technology-advanced city in a 2008 Digital Cities Survey, will deploy its product as part of a continuing effort to embrace e-government and reduce the amount of paper, travel and other time and cost inefficiencies specifically associated with obtaining construction permits. www.avolvesoftware.com.

Parent notification services

SchoolReach, provider of parent notification services used by public, private and parochial schools, has entered into a partnership agreement with the Minnesota Association of School Administrators (MASA). Through this alliance, the SchoolReach system will be made available to MASA member schools at a discount. A state-chartered association of the American Association of School Administrators, MASA is the leading advocacy organization for school administrators in the state of Minnesota. With its three-step ‘Record-Select-Send’ instant messaging process, SchoolReach allows administrators to record a brief message, select a specific list of parents, teachers, district staff, or community members to whom the message can be sent, and deliver those messages simultaneously via voice, e-mail, or text messaging. (Dr. Charles Kyte, executive director of MASA.)

When the children get home to their PC, Spysure can help protect children from paedophiles and blocks adult content. In the office it monitors and views employees' activities and tells you what is happening online. http://www.spysure.com

State of Utah selects Qwest

The State of Utah (www.utah.gov) has chosen Qwest Communications International Inc. to deliver a cost-saving, converged voice and data network. With Qwest’s Ethernet solution, state and local government and businesses in Utah have access to additional bandwidth speeds to help satisfy increasing public demand for online services. Qwest began connecting 300 locations in Salt Lake City and along Utah’s Wasatch Front using Qwest’s Metro Optical Ethernet (QMOE) data networking platform. Thirty government sites have already been connected as part of the 3-year, $7.2 million agreement. (Stephen Fletcher, CIO, State of Utah.)

Crash Prevention Program

The North Dakota Highway Patrol and the Department of Transportation’s Office of Traffic Safety have certified North Dakota’s approved Crash Prevention Program, NorthDakotaCrashPrevention.com, providing a new alternative to North Dakota motorists who want to remove points from their driving records or obtain an insurance discount. The program provides Internet-based instruction in defensive driving techniques and other safe-driving skills. North Dakota drivers who successfully complete the course may be able to use it to reduce fines or dismiss the ticket after receiving a traffic citation. Or, drivers may opt to use it to obtain a two-year reduction of 5% to their auto insurance premium rates.

Measuring schooling effectiveness

Measuring schooling effectiveness is critical to improving education outcomes. SAS Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) for K-12, recently saw its 1-millionth login. Four states – Tennessee, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina – use the software-as-a-service (SaaS) statewide. SAS EVAAS for K-12 lets users analyze and report on student learning growth over the school year, a key metric in evaluating schooling effectiveness. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides $100 billion for education, making better evaluation a major emphasis. The milestone login occurred in Tennessee, where Dr. William Sanders developed the EVAAS methodology more than 20 years ago. SAS EVAAS for K-12 is also used by the South Carolina Teacher Advancement Program (SCTAP).

MMIS for North Carolina

CSC has selected Pegasystems’ Build for Change technology to provide critical system functions to the new Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) for North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Pegasystems’ technology will provide the ability to respond quickly to legislative and programmatic changes, and improve service to North Carolina’s Medicaid recipients and providers. The North Carolina MMIS will provide claims processing, automated workflow, standardized reporting and analytics, and a secure Web portal for use by providers in performing claims entry and eligibility verification. In addition, the North Carolina MMIS will include service processes for providers, tailored service interactions, work automation for improved efficiencies, enhanced scripting to guide manual work and improve quality, and rapid development of ongoing service enhancements. (Thomas P. Anderson, president of CSC’s North American Public Sector Civil and Health Services group.)