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The article reports on the new requirement of California that all voting machines, including touch-screen systems, will produce a paper audit trail capable of verifying the accuracy of a tally. The state requires the audit trail for primary vote to ensure election officials follow the state law passed in 2005. According to Bruce McPherson, a spokeswoman for California Secretary of State, 37 out of 58 counties in the state are using touch screen systems. She added that voters can verify their vote via a paper record, showing that their vote cast was indeed the vote that was recorded.

This article reports on the decision of a federal judge in a California directive that decertified touch-screen voting machines and withheld future certification until vendors of those systems can meet specific security requirements as of July 2004. The decision arose from a lawsuit, Benavidez v. Shelley, brought by disability rights advocates and four California counties that oppose California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's requirement for voter-verifiable paper audit trails. The counties also oppose Shelley's order to decertify direct-recording equipment (DRE) voting systems. The plaintiffs argued that banning the systems would disenfranchise visually or physically impaired voters. The opinion written by Judge Florence-Marie Cooper was given. Cooper noted that Shelley is responsible for ensuring that votes are counted accurately, and requiring a paper audit trail is one way of fulfilling that obligation. State and local elections officials around the country are scrambling to ensure that e-voting systems in different jurisdictions are reliable and can be secured from tampering in time for the November election. The decision follows the release of a report two weeks ago by an IT security panel that outlined a strategy for certifying the security and reliability of touch-screen DRE voting systems QuickLink 47931.

The article reports that the San Francisco based health care system the Catholic Healthcare West is finally seeing significant cost reductions and streamlined business processes after the health care provider nears end of 10 year ERP journey. The journey began in 1996 with a failed attempt to standardize on SAP AG's software. The company then turned to Lawson Software Inc. for its ERP applications. Soon the health care system, the country's eighth largest, will have rolled out finance, supply chain and human resources applications from Lawson to 31 of its facilities. The $54 million Lawson project, is replacing 200 internally developed and packaged legacy systems. According to one of its official the project has already cut supply costs by $1.5 million and annual IT support and paper costs by $1 million apiece. Nearly 80% of the healthcare facilities in California, Nevada and Arizona are now running the new applications. The benefits of this ERP include the consolidation of multiple systems, such as financial applications from six vendors and materials management software from four. INSET: Catholic Healthcare West ERP Project..

This article presents Visa U.S.A. Inc. as the recipient of Premier 100 Information Technology Leaders 2004 Best in Class award in Foster City, California. When an inaccurate charge is listed on a credit card bill, it is not just the customer who sees red. Settling a disputed charge is one of the costliest components of a credit card company's business. At Visa, a new back-office infrastructure will reduce the time and labor required to handle a customer-disputed charge by creating an online, automated process. The Visa Resolve Online project is a Web-enabled application used to facilitate changes to the re-engineered disputes process. The greatest benefit of the project has been to simplify the process by eliminating most paper documentation, reducing the time required to resolve disputes and eliminating unnecessary steps in the process. The Web-based tool gives member banks, merchants and customer support representatives real-time access to transaction data through secure browser screens or private Internet Protocol network. Subsequent releases of Visa Resolve included the ability to create and transmit chargebacks, attach images and supporting documentation and transmit large volumes of images relevant to disputes.

Highlights how handheld devices are saving the city of Palo Alto, California, large sums of money. Impact of using devices on paper usage and the workload of technicians; Use of 3Com Corporation's PalmPilots handheld device by help desk employees in California; Amount of money city invested for seven of these devices; Information on the PalmPilot device.

Reports that the Los Angeles Police Department in California has launched a computerization effort aimed at reducing administrative costs. Improvement on efficiency; Reduction of police officers' paper work.

Information about several papers discussed at the "LinuxWorld Conference and Expo" in 2007 in San Francisco, California is presented. Attendants tried to estimate how Linux and other opensource software could fit into their organizations. Hai Nguyen of Sierra Pacific Mortgage Inc. searched for data backup and disaster recovery tools for Linux and opensource infrastructure. Stewart Savage of Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District used Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux to support its Oracle databases.

The article focuses on an appliance that fingerprints unstructured data. Code Green Networks Inc. located in Sunnyvale,California markets its new product, 75,000 dollar CI-1100 appliance. This performs deep-content fingerprinting on stored information in more than 400 document formats. Most corporate data are being kept in unstructured data. These are important data such as source code, design documents, and merger and acquisition papers. These are the information that Code Green proposes to fingerprint.

Election officials in San Bernardino County, Calif., announced plans to defy a state-imposed ban on the electronic systems in the upcoming November 2004 presidential election. In a statement on May 11, 2004, county officials said they plan to use touch-screen voting systems developed by Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. The decision is in direct defiance of an April 30, 2004 directive by the California secretary of state that stripped the systems of their certification in 10 counties, pending security improvements. The directive also banned the use of touch-screen systems from McKinney, Diebold Election Systems in four other counties. The controversy over the use of the systems stems from research and public statements by independent IT security experts who uncovered glaring security vulnerabilities in the hardware and software used in many of the e-voting systems on the market. Jeremy Epstein, senior director for product security at WebMethods Inc. is one of thousands of private-sector executives who have signed an online petition that calls for vendors to provide voter-verified paper audit trails for their systems.