NASCIO to Partner with Georgia Tech Research Institute on NIEF QuickStart Program

LEXINGTON, KY, Tuesday, October 22, 2013 — Building on the adoption of the National Identity Exchange Federation (NIEF), the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) has partnered with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to pilot the NIEF QuickStart Program in multiple states to promote data exchange among law enforcement, public safety, and emergency management agencies.

The goal of the pilot is to provide a standard, commoditized capability of trusted identity and attribute sharing. NIEF member agencies can leverage this capability to achieve wide-scale identity reuse, single sign-on (SSO) to resources, and policy compliant control of access to the broadest set of public safety-related information resources at all levels of government. This approach promises to deliver a marked improvement in the efficiency and automation of policy-based access control decisions on information resources. The goals of the pilot are to strategically jump-start key states’ information exchange capabilities, improve awareness of NIEF’s strategic vision, and drive an increased value proposition for all NIEF participants.

“States have struggled to develop identity trust frameworks, but the NIEF QuickStart Program will demonstrate the value proposition of a common framework,” stated NASCIO Executive Director, Doug Robinson. “The value of any federation or information sharing environment increases with the number of participants, and the pilot participants will be seeds that drive wide adoption.”

GTRI will assist selected participants by facilitating and shepherding them through NIEF’s formal on-boarding process. It is expected that the selected on-boarding projects will be completed in approximately twelve (12) months.

“Over time, the NIEF QuickStart Program will create a way for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments to create an affordable, fast and repeatable process for on-boarding into a common trusted environment for identity and attribute exchange,” said John Wandelt, who is a GTRI Research Fellow and the Executive Director of NIEF. “Scalability is vital, and this pilot will demonstrate the practicality of rapid NIEF on-boarding for partners of any size.”

It is expected that the NIEF QuickStart Program will eventually grow to accommodate and facilitate on-boarding of agencies at all levels of government, but the pilot phase of the program is targeted primarily towards U.S. states and state-level agencies. NASCIO and GTRI seek to quickly engage with interested states and begin executing on the selection process. States interested in submitting a readiness assessment profile for the NIEF QuickStart Program can go to www.surveymonkey.com/s/R8Z7CBN and submit an assessment profile online. For more details on NIEF, please visit https://nief.gfipm.net/.

This effort is a partnership between the US Department of Homeland Security, Program Management Office for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE) and the US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and is led by the GTRI/NASCIO team. Funding for this effort is provided by the PM-ISE through BJA.

About GTRI
The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is a highly regarded applied research and development organization that is part of the Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the world’s top-ranked research universities. With more than 1,700 scientists, engineers and other professionals, GTRI helps solve the most difficult problems facing government and industry across the nation and around the world. For more information on GTRI visit www.gtri.gatech.edu.