Arizona, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Texas are working with a Johns Hopkins University lab to speed up how they react to threat intelligence.

Eric Roche, who served five years as Kansas City, Missouri’s first chief data officer, is now the chief budget officer in Pearland, Texas, where he said data will still play a central role in his work.

Roadway sensor data will fuel software pilots in Austin, Texas; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Walnut Creek, California; and Westminster, Colorado, after the cities won a competition earlier this week.

States' earlier work moving agencies to the cloud or building processes and relationships have paid off in spades during a pandemic that has shortened timelines and stretched organizations' capabilities.

More than 30 non-IT employees in Garland, a Dallas suburb of about 240,000, taught themselves how to design digital workflows making government more efficient.

The agency said it detected "unauthorized access," but revealed few details about the incident, which came days after Texas courts were targeted by ransomware.

Erp, a cybersecurity consultant and former Texas Health and Human Services Commission CISO, will join the city as its top IT security official on June 1.

The Friday attack didn't compromise any data, officials said, but some servers and websites have been taken offline while the incident is investigated.

Kimbriel, who started with the Texas Department of Information Resources in 2008, said he plans to advise state and local governments on how to adopt Texas' successful "CIO as a broker" model.