Contributors

  AvePoint Public sector organizations live in collaboration environments: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and the mix of older systems most agencies still maintain alongside them. Those environments hold an enormous amount of sensitive information (records, case files, HR data, student data, procurement documents) and every day that information is being created, shared, copied, and sometimes mishandled. Getting to a modern, well-governed state in that kind of environment is a multi-year journey. Some organizations are still moving from on-premises systems to the cloud for the first time. Others are already in the cloud and trying to keep up with the governance, compliance, and records obligations that come with it. A growing number are evaluating a switch from one pla…

Most public sector organizations don't have a data shortage. They have a data usefulness problem. Dashboards get built, reports get delivered, and yet when a program leader asks a practical question ("are we actually moving the needle on this?"), the answer often still requires a scramble, a few analysts, and a series of email threads. Some of that is a tooling problem... But a lot of it isn't. Government data work is hard because the data itself often lives in systems that were never designed to talk to each other, because responsibility for it is spread across many teams, and because the people who would benefit most from it are usually the furthest from how it is produced. And even when government has access to the most powerful and capable technology platforms, those systems typicall…

Databricks is a leading data and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and MLflow. Their mission is to simplify and democratize data and AI so that every organization can harness its full potential. Public sector leaders are being asked to do two things at once: modernize the services constituents actually interact with, and show credible progress on AI. Both depend on something that does not usually make the headlines, which is the state of the organization's data. In most agencies and institutions, critical data is spread across many systems that were never designed to work together. Eligibility data lives in one place, case management in another, finance in a third, and so on. Analytics efforts spend most of their time m…

A meaningful share of the average workday in government and education is spent hunting. Hunting for the right document, the right policy, the right person who knows how something was handled last time. As workforces shrink, expectations grow, and longtime employees retire, that hunting quietly becomes one of the largest hidden drags on organizational performance. The problem isn't that the information doesn't exist. It usually does. The problem is that it's scattered across email, file shares, chat, ticketing systems, intranets, and shared drives, each with its own structure and permissions, and each of them slightly harder to search than the last. What Glean does Glean is an AI-powered work assistant that sits across the tools an organization already uses, including email, docu…

Island created the Enterprise Browser - a unified, enterprise-grade browser built for government agencies and mission-critical operations.   Security and ease of use usually sit on opposite sides of a tradeoff in the public sector. Tighter controls tend to slow people down. More modern, flexible tools tend to create new gaps for security and compliance teams to worry about. Most of the decisions leaders make in this space involve picking a point somewhere along that line. Island is interesting because it changes the shape of that tradeoff rather than asking organizations to pick a side. What Island does Island is an Enterprise Browser, a category the company helped define. The underlying idea is straightforward: Most modern work in the public sector already happens inside…

A lot of what the public sector is judged on, from how quickly benefits get issued to how reliably schools and hospitals run, depends on infrastructure most constituents (and many leaders) never see. Storage, data protection, and the systems that keep information flowing between applications are almost never the things people want to talk about, until they stop working. The challenge is that the underlying infrastructure in many agencies and institutions was built for a very different era of computing. Data volumes have grown enormously, workloads have shifted partially to the cloud, and the expectations for uptime, recovery, and performance have all gone up. Meanwhile, cyber threats like ransomware have turned what used to be a back-office concern into a question leaders answer to boards…

Modernizing and Securing Government Technology Is Really, Really Challenging.   The public sector is uniquely made up of a diverse set of stakeholders; each with their different rules, regulations, incentive structures, and languages - you've probably heard some of the acronyms... It’s as if there are independent stakeholder islands, each with really important functions, that are both completely foreign to each other and completely dependent upon each other. Understanding, let alone coordinating between, all of the stakeholder islands to drive progress forward can feel impossible. The result is a marketplace where good technology often fails to reach the people who need it, agencies pay more than they should, and vendors spend years on deals that were never realistic to begin wi…

A surprising amount of government work still runs on paper forms, email threads, and manual handoffs. Permit applications, benefit requests, internal approvals, constituent services, and so much more often move through processes that were designed decades ago and have never been meaningfully redesigned, even when the underlying systems have been partially digitized. For constituents, this shows up as long waits, unclear status, and the recurring experience of being asked for information the agency already has. For staff, it shows up as time spent shepherding work through a process rather than doing the work itself. Both problems tend to get worse in the places agencies can least afford: high-volume services, understaffed teams, and programs with tight statutory deadlines.   W…

Most public sector organizations have plenty of dashboards, reports, and tools. What they often do not have is confidence that everyone is working from the same numbers. This shows up in familiar ways. Two departments present conflicting figures at the same meeting. A new AI tool gives a different answer than the dashboard leadership has been using for years. A legislator asks a simple question and it takes a week to reconcile the responses from different agencies. The underlying problem is rarely the data itself. It is that every tool, team, and system applies its own definitions of what a "case," a "student," a "beneficiary," or an "incident" actually is. What Strategy does Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, is an enterprise analytics and AI platform built…

Physical security and facility operations in government and education have historically involved running several disconnected systems side by side. Cameras from one vendor, access control from another, alarms from a third, environmental sensors from a fourth. Each has its own software, its own credentials, its own update cycle, and its own team responsible for it. When something happens, piecing together what actually occurred across those systems is slow. When nothing is happening, keeping them all running, patched, and compliant is a steady drain on teams that are usually already stretched thin. And leaders often end up with less visibility into their own facilities than the public assumes they have. What Verkada does Verkada brings video security, access control, alarms, environmen…