What is the common verbiage of Hawaii's broadband initiatives set in senate and house bills SB895, HB984, and HB1077?

Easy, "Carried over to 2010 Regular Session."

• SB895 - 2/10/2009 Establishes the Hawaii Communications Commission (HCC), The committee(s) recommends that the measure be deferred. Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.
• HB984 - 5/11/2009 Implements key recommendations of the Hawaii broadband task force by establishing the Hawaii broadband commissioner (HBC). Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.
• HB1077 - 5/11/2009 Establishes the Hawaii Communications Commission (HCC) in the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs (DCCA).
  The committee on EDT-CPN deferred the measure. Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.

The governor last jumped on the media bandwagon with her press conference in Feb 2009 announcing formation of the Hawaii Communications Commission. Yes, the bill listed above (SB895) which is deferred until the 2010 session. There may be budget problems, there may be difficulty understanding the scope of broadband communications in today's society and economy.  But the reality is all broadband bills are deferred, and at this point on hold.

Try a search engine query on "Hawaii CIO," or "Hawaii Chief Information Officer." You might get a couple corporate links pop up, or possibly the University of Hawaii's CIO link, but the only state agency within the first two pages of links is for the Information and Communications Services Division of the Department of Accounting and General Services (DAGS). The first impression, once hitting the Hawaii Information and Communications Services Division (ICSD) landing page on the State of Hawaii's website, is the microwave tower graphic.

The Information and Communication Services Division (ICSD) of the Department of Accounting and General Services is the lead agency for information technology in the Executive Branch. It is responsible for comprehensively managing the information processing and telecommunication systems in order to provide services to all agencies of the State of Hawaii. The ICSD plans, coordinates, organizes, directs, and administers services to insure the efficient and effective development of systems.

In fact, the Hawaii CIO, as appointed by the governor in 2004, acts in this capacity as a part time job, as his "day job" is comptroller of the State. In that role, the only true function managed within the ICSD is oversight of the state's main data center.

Vietnam is in the process of upgrading the entire country's IT system. With support from organizations such as the World Bank, Vietnam is rebuilding not only physical infrastructure, but also starting from the ground up building new IT systems - including a large scale virtualization strategy.

Hawaii may not be so progressive. The first line of an Associated Press story on Hawaii's lack of a functional IT strategy goes like this:

"In many ways Hawaii's government runs its computers like the Internet age hardly happened." (AP)

The story goes on to expose Hawaii's lack of IT policy, the fact they are using old systems, a mixture of Apple and PCs for individual users, have a 1960s version of disaster recovery (offsite physical diskette storage), and other parallels with industry that add more discouraging evidence to Hawaii's IT shortfalls.