Last Day of the Legislative Session

There is always lots of activity on the last day of the legislative session and today is no exception. House and Senate are both working their way through lots of remaining bills. Seems like half of the legislators are losing their voice today. Good luck to Reps. Clark and Holdaway on regaining their voices. Still waiting to see what happens to HB426 and SB38. 365 bills (one for every day of the year) have passed so far this year.

There were some very good presentations at Network World's IT Roadmap conference I attended yesterday. We are working on ideas to improve what we do locally and sharing some of the best ideas from the conference.

I also learned about Bungee Labs from a Twitter post. Bungee Labs is a SLC-based company that provides a SDDS - Software Development and Deployment as a Service. Here's a good overview from ZDNet.

New NASCIO paper on IT Governance and Business Outcomes with a couple of good Utah contributors.

The US Department of Education has a new map service (see above image) for their School District Demographics System (there's that SDDS acronym again). I just wish you could access a KML file for any map you produced with this ESRI service. That would be really nice.

See the March Issue of Governement Technology for the top Dreamers and Doers in gov IT. Also includes an article on what governments are doing with virtualization. We've been virtualizing servers for 4-5 years now with VMWare. Last night, I sat next to the Citrix rep on the airplane and had a good discussion on their various XEN products.

Clarification: Senator Hickman made some comments with respect to Senate Bill 38 (listen to audio files), Transparency in Government when discussing the Public Meeting Notice website about software developers taking 18 months. Requirements were passed to the developers in October. The development of this site actually took less than 5 months. It is in testing now and will be ready to go live on April 1st as required. Local governments requested a delay so that they can prepare to enter data in the system, train their people, etc. Something like 2,000 public entitities will use the system.