55 articles · Economics & Procurement · page 2 of 3
Articles
Week of 4 March 2024
Days of cash on hand was the resilience metric that mattered in the Change Healthcare outage
Two weeks into the Change Healthcare outage, the federal response was about money. For providers that were never hacked, survival came down to three questions: how long could they last, who would lend to them, and who would finally pay for the loss.
Week of 25 December 2023
Someone else’s lawsuit, your contracts: how the Times case reached regulated AI buyers
Banks, health systems and agencies were not parties to The New York Times’s December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. It still reached them in three ways: through the vendor promises they relied on, the content they published and the prompts their vendors kept.
Week of 20 November 2023
Why the useful response to OpenAI’s board crisis was a days-to-switch number
No vendor questionnaire could have predicted OpenAI’s November 2023 boardroom upheaval. What regulated buyers could control was how costly it would be to move away from any one AI provider, and that came down to contracts, architecture and fallbacks.
Week of 16 October 2023
Free, measured and always on: the open banking interface the CFPB proposed and banks could not price
The CFPB’s October 2023 open banking proposal turned a bank’s data connection into a measured, always-on service it could not charge for. Banks and credit unions had to work out what they must deliver, what they could not recover, and what they still controlled.
Week of 28 August 2023
Medicare’s negotiated prices would reach hospital pharmacies as refunds, and refunds have float
Medicare named its first ten drugs for price negotiation in August 2023. Hospitals with their own pharmacies inherited three problems with three different owners: the cash a refund ties up, the tangle with 340B, and the reconciliation systems both depend on.
Week of 7 August 2023
After Moody’s downgrades, regional bank technology had to argue in unit costs
Moody’s August 2023 downgrades confirmed that the spring’s bank stress would become a long earnings squeeze. Regional bank technology budgets now had to be defended in the CFO’s terms: cost per account, faster liquidity data, and vendor contracts priced for thinner margins.
Week of 31 July 2023
Prospect Medical’s ransomware attack ended up on the table in a hospital sale
Ransomware hit Prospect Medical Holdings in August 2023, striking an operator already short of money and midway through selling three Connecticut hospitals. For operators like that, cyber resilience becomes a balance-sheet and deal term, priced by buyers, lenders and state approvers.
Week of 29 May 2023
Flat caps, rising subscriptions: how the debt deal squeezed federal IT from the inside
The 2023 debt deal held nondefense spending roughly flat for two years. Federal IT budgets did not shrink evenly: subscriptions and cloud bills grew on their own, modernization slipped by default, and technical staff thinned through attrition. Each needed its own control.
Week of 27 March 2023
Why the spyware order put the burden on acquisition staff
Executive Order 14093 did not ban commercial spyware. It barred agencies from using tools that threatened US security or had been misused abroad, which meant the policy would stand or fall on the unglamorous work of agency lawyers, security staff and contracting officers.
Week of 6 March 2023
SVB’s depositors learned their bank was an unassessed supplier
Silicon Valley Bank’s failure looked to most people like a banking story. For the companies that kept their cash there, it was something more familiar: a critical supplier collapsing, taking cash, payments and the services built on them down at once.
Week of 16 January 2023
DORA’s two-year runway, measured in contract renewals
Europe’s DORA gave financial firms two years to get their technology houses in order, with no exemption for contracts already signed. The hardest part was rarely writing policies or running tests. It was the calendar for reopening agreements with technology providers.
Week of 26 December 2022
Section 524B gave hospitals a baseline to buy against
A spending law signed in December 2022 told medical device makers to build in cybersecurity. It never mentioned hospitals, yet it handed them something they had long lacked: a federal baseline to cite when choosing devices and writing contracts. Older equipment stayed where it was.
Week of 19 December 2022
The quantum law asked for a price tag agencies could only get from their vendors
A December 2022 law asked OMB to tell Congress what protecting federal systems from future quantum computers would cost. Most of that cost sat in products agencies did not build, so an honest answer depended on vendor roadmaps, contracts and replacement cycles.
Week of 21 November 2022
Banned from the market, still on the wall: the FCC’s equipment order and the installed base
In November 2022 the FCC stopped approving new equipment from Huawei and ZTE, and security gear from Hikvision, Dahua and Hytera. It left installed devices alone, so the real work moved to each agency’s own inventory.
Week of 7 November 2022
Who checked the people who moved FTX’s money
FTX’s banks, investors and partners had studied its growth. Few had asked three plain questions: who can move the money, who checks them, and whose money it is. Any financial institution can put those questions to every fast-growing counterparty.
Week of 24 October 2022
For credit unions, the 1033 outline was a question for the core processor
The CFPB’s first open banking outline kicked off a review aimed at small institutions. For community banks and credit unions, compliance would arrive as a product from their core and digital banking vendors, so the real decisions were about coverage, cost and contracts.
Week of 12 September 2022
M-22-18 asked producers to sign; agencies first had to know who they were
In 2022 the White House told software makers selling to federal agencies to sign their names to how they build it. The form got the headlines. The lasting work was knowing who made your software, and deciding what their promises were worth.
Week of 1 August 2022
Why buying the same software as your neighbors removes your fallback
Ransomware at one NHS software supplier knocked urgent care systems offline across many providers at once, and neighbors could not cover for each other because they ran the same product. U.S. health systems buying shared software face the same exposure.
Week of 25 July 2022
Chip policy ran on a decade’s clock; IT backlogs ran on a quarter’s
The CHIPS and Science Act passed while network switches and servers sat on back order. It was about where chips would be made in the 2030s. IT leaders needed separate answers, on separate timescales, for the backlog, the refresh plan and provenance.
Week of 23 May 2022
An acquisition announcement is a free option on your exit plan
Broadcom’s deal to buy VMware gave customers eighteen months before anything changed. The organizations that fared best treated that time as a cheap option: they priced a way out, kept it alive with small investments, and used it, on evidence, at renewal.