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Cybersecurity Insights

a NIST blog

How will they measure up? RTI awarded to evaluate the class of 2016 state and local pilots!

September 7, 2017

By: Mike Garcia

NIST is the federal government’s measurement agency. While the ultimate goal is innovation and adoption in the market, we need to know that the solutions being deployed present an advance for organizations and individuals alike. Measurement is critical to understanding what solutions work and how effectively we’re spending taxpayer dollars.

Today, we’re announcing the winner of this spring’s competition to assess our 2016 round of pilot projects. Assessments of pilot projects will help us—the identity community—understand the most successful technologies and approaches and improve decision making for anyone looking to invest in identity solutions.

The assessment

Earlier this year, we announced that we wanted to evaluate how well our five 2016 state and local pilots have used digital identity technologies to improve and streamline the delivery of state and local government services.

We issued a notice of funding opportunity seeking an assessment to: understand the benefits of the five piloted solutions for both organizations and end users; enable broader adoption of online credentials for state and local government services; provide recommendations for applying identity solutions; and understand lessons learned to increase the public benefit.

The recipients awarded last year for the class of 2016 state pilots are:

The awardee

Today we are excited to announce that we have awarded Research Triangle Institute (RTI)—an independent, nonprofit research institute—to conduct the evaluation and help shed light on how successfully public sector programs can adopt similar solutions.

RTI will interact with each pilot team to establish baseline metrics and collect ongoing data during implementation, with different timelines for each pilot. NIST anticipates that RTI will release one report for each project (five in total) and a final report summarizing the lessons learned from the five pilots, which will be issued at the end of the project.

Throughout the grant, RTI will be finding ways to disseminate these findings broadly to reach communities that can benefit from the great work of RTI and the projects’ partners.

RTI’s assessments will help pave the way for NIST to better inform and improve upon broader cybersecurity efforts in the future, and for state and local governments to understand options available for deploying trusted identities across more government services and benefit programs.

Measurement Science and Partnerships

About the author

Mike Garcia

Mike Garcia is a PhD economist and Federal 100 award winning cybersecurity expert. He currently serves as lead for the Trusted Identities Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working to catalyze commercial and government adoption of innovative online identity solutions and advancing standards, guidance, and measurement science in identity management.

Mike has focused on cyber economics at NIST since 2011 and was previously with the Department of Homeland Security. He has also worked as a market research manager and software engineer. His dissertation analyzed the conditions that induce firms to invest in preventing data breaches and to report them when they happen.

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