Advanced Communications and Information Technology - House

There are six of us here to get to. What Mr paragraph is. Hi good afternoon look like to officially welcome everyone to the first meeting of the advanced medication information technology meeting my name is representative Stephen Meeks and I'm honored to once again have the opportunity to be able to to chair the committee with me is our and brand new vice chair representative Jeremy will rage in Mr vice chair on if you've got any words of wisdom or one introduce yourself this morning I have no wisdom I'm just thankful to be here. All right Working on our Committee amenities are staff and then we'll go around the room late buddy introduce themselves so to my left here is our committee analyst who was with us last time Mr blade Gillam and so we're honored to have Mr Gillam here with us on the committee our assistant is merry bet dis and she is not here this morning in a course are turning miss Stevens is also not here because she's busy drafting awesome bills for us at this time I'd like to do is I know we've we've only got about half our committee here just crazy morning and some on the forty man caught up in the weather so for the ones that are here while we go around the room we just say you know this stricter from and interest you have in technology and so forth and well we ladies first will close gonna go first. Thank you Mr I'm Denise Garner I'm from fable District twenty now and I have talked to some representative makes several times and so I told him that someone was laughing up there when they put me on this committee but I have learned so much and I'm excited to be here so thank you very much. Thank you very. I'm Stan Berry District forty four thanks in the middle part of Polk County and the little bit of Johnson are they mere getting enough served on. this committee before Mr minks and enjoy it and uh hope to. Be able to help thank you the last. Regular member. Representive R. J. Hogg District eighty one of the new guy on the block so I do like technology like phones emails and everything involved with technology no my district goes slowing county Bryant Alexander Shannon Hills looking for to be on the committee we appreciate you being here with us and to our two alternates or here if you gentleman what introduce yourself of representative McClure representing portions of hot spring installing County as far as communication technology I'm old enough to remember when wireless communications with first budding and got in on the first part of that just about everything this does works in with different offices and places of hold involuntary and so this is B. committee. Thank you Mister chair I am Scott Richardson district thirteen Rogers and Bentonville area interest in technology let's see I first started I did my first network when it was land tastic I've done everything from build computers all the way through to now my my title is director of technology for CI engineering Northwest Arkansas maintain the role there and had dealing with the mostly in points but I've I've survived a lot of interesting things in our state so my interest in this committee is doing whatever I can to bring a perspective from an end user and a and a the corporate America to try to help us continue to support the growth of technology in the state so thank you. Hello again that Jeremy Wooldridge District one portions of Greene County Clay County Randolph County and thankful to be here my estimation broadband and information technology is a great path to expansion for the state of Arkansas for many reasons especially Mary the state so definitely have an interest in this committee in honor to serve the Mister thank you let miss brown get settled in and then let her introduce yourself. Everybody I am Carolyn brown District sixty seven primarily Jacksonville insurer would and I've been on this committee for a few terms I really enjoy it and I look forward to what we're going to be able to do for the people of Arkansas thank you. All right of course last but not least representative Meeks I'm served a new brand new district forty two which is a green bar up to Fairfield Bay I have a degree in technology and that's where my interest started in been serving as chair of this committee for couple times now focusing on broadband and a couple other issues and so again looking for to to working with everyone what I'd like to do now is to go out to the audience and we do have a couple speakers that are going to speak to us just a minute but I was not allow the any other agencies or organizations if anybody would like to stand up just introduce themselves to the Committee can kind of the first not getting familiar with the the folks that we're gonna be working within the public and private sector or anybody like to. I with the governor's office. We were on. Taxes. All for you but. Thank you. The Arkansas. Mission. Definitely at some point will be here for Mr out yep Deffenbaugh. The general manager for and I see Arkansas and I represent the information network of Arkansas. Once once okay we run along because this is a select committee are. Rules are just slightly different from the regular standing committees we do have to have six members present in order to make a quorum and that can also consist of our alternates but the alternates only count if the primary member is not here so if anyone is interested in single alternates and primary members we've got that up here Agendas are prepared in accordance with House rules provided two days in advance Barker notification will be sent to the members who have bills on the agenda two days before the committee meeting but basic rules like the other committees after bill or resolution has appeared on the Committee agenda or has been called up for consideration and the sponsor is not present it'll be moved to the bottom of the active in after three times it will go to the deferred list realistically I would be surprised if we met more than three times usually most sessions it's only two or three times as always amendment should be in writing but when always make sure you let our staff members know if you do have an amendment and we can set a special order of of business if need be and generally the way that I at work this committee if you have a question that you would like to ask during a bill presentation and then a follow up generally speaking I tend to be a little more lax than the other chairmen if you have a question and a follow up just go ahead and straighten ask your follow up question if you start getting into two three four five follow ups at that point we will probably go on to the next person but just for efficiency sake if you have a question and a follow up behind to the questions and follow up and then we'll go from there see how the see how things are in the in the queue other than that I think we're gonna go ahead and jump into our gas so this morning the maid agency that we have oversight of is the department of information systems so I'm gonna lead to a Director Askins if you would please I'll take the under the table as long as well as any other folks that you might want to bring up with you and We'll let you give us just a high level overview of your raw department. And you're recognized Sir yes Sir thank you Mr chairman So I am very cognizant of the fact that I am standing between you and launch so we will go quickly actually I do want to just breeze through just the notes that I prepared mainly to offer just the opportunity to have questions and I I typically like dialogue back and forth from a question standpoint rather than going to a presentation so I'll I'll quickly tell you what we are I've I've been the director of DIS for roughly two years now and when I came in I looked at the I. S. and said so we are a division yes we are and and an agency if you will but what it really gets down to is we're a B. two B. business we are a business to business business we have we serve the various departments around the state fifteen departments we service some cities we service some other small entities but those are our customers and typically for those of you know who don't know from from how we bill folks is we get our expenses and we look at those expenses and they we transferred those to a rate and we bill the agencies are the departments at the rate we're what is called a cost recovery agency so when you're when you're building someone they expect a level of customer service so that's the conversation that I've had with our folks from the very get go is we've got to start thinking like we are a B. two B. business we have customers and our customers have customers those are citizens of Arkansas so. What I've tried to challenge really over the last eighteen months is we need to think like a retailer so how how does a retailer thank from a standpoint of of the retail industry went through this about ten years ago it's how to make things easier for the citizen are in the in the retailer case how to make things easier for the customer how do you make the experience the best for the customer why they want to come back why the loop why don't they want to buy from me I have a lot of competition maybe Arkansas doesn't have a lot of competition in terms of where our citizens go but we can certainly make things easier for our citizens in terms of doing business with the state so I challenged us quit thinking like a government division think like a retailer so we're we're beginning to do that with a lot of our various customers that we have out there in a and I think it's beginning to make a difference now with all of that comes some complexity everything that you make easy on the top means that there's going to be some click some complexity down below because you're pushing data back and forth you're running analytics you're running some business intelligence you're you're making you're making sure that they're that experiences seamless well that there's a lot of data going underneath so what I wanted to share with you all the different types of services that we offer and then but the I think shall be school to talk shall B. Johnson is going to talk a little bit about GIS and then we can open it up for questions. So the services that we offer from an end user support standpoint think about the workstations the laptops the mobile phones the network and the internet in the various agencies those are so think about us from a plumbing standpoint where the where the plumbing from from that standpoint we support all those workstations and laptops mobile phones. We host of the a lot of systems we have three data centers we have one over it back we have one out in South in west little rock skews me and then we have one in north Arkansas and local where we are working a partnership with the state police so the our primary operation right now is in west little rock and we have fail over redundancy fail over active active redundancies with the the data center and local so we feel like that Go we started on a major initiative we we took a very what I would consider to be a very federated environment or very decentralized environment and we have started to centralize that environment if you want to get right some people say well you're building a private cloud possibly you could look at it that way but what we're trying to do is get everything under a single platform or enterprise platform single roof then we can begin to understand what our true foot print is if you have to spend that out to the cloud one of these days that's great a lot of times if you just spend stuff out to the cloud without truly understanding of the workloads that you're talking about you don't get the savings you don't get the benefit of the efficiencies so we're about eighty percent complete on that right now. I am very excited to say I think for the first time in the history of Arkansas from a I. T. standpoint we have everyone on a standard backup we have standard security frameworks we have standard disaster recovery we have standard active to active redundancies and we're on a standard platform that is a huge development for us if you're talking about understanding your risk mitigating that risk what is our risk we now have a much clearer picture as to what we what we have and what we are what we are providing in terms of I. T. services in the future that will also mean cost avoidance for us which is which is critical so as soon as we begin to get to gain an understanding of this will be able to offer some true cost avoidance and then also will be able to be in a much better position for business constitute continuity of business so. But I have a team that is called a our data team and we are operation operational Ising that a our data team think of it is a team that can take data from different sources and we match that all together for for a very technical term we bash it all together we create the matches we create what I would call model ready data so the various departments and agencies can run analytics the the beauty and the benefit of this is you are now sharing data where you've never been able to do that before we set up Matt we set up all the data sharing agreements to make sure that we're in compliance make sure that we're making from a privacy standpoint we're protecting folks privacy but we are beginning to share data so we can look at analytics from a standpoint of true cost savings what are the what are the outcomes that the buzz word is always data driven decisioning and that is essentially what my A. R. data team who's here with me today the A. R. data team enables that we're the neighbors we're not the analytics guys we're not the we're not the the data scientist over healthcare over DFA but what we're enabling. Is the FNA and health to share their data and understand where our dollars being spent are we getting the outcomes that we thought we were going to get if we're not getting those outcomes maybe we can make some tweaks here and there so this team largely in Abels that process and that's what's called our our radar R. A. R. data team from a professional services standpoint we offer customer dark I'm sorry custom application development and management we can build apps we can outsource those out to make sure those apps integrate with the system we have database administration services we have apps canteen that make sure that our our K. twelve network in our schools are supported from a standpoint of connectivity from a standpoint of security from a standpoint of just problem solving in in many cases Network services we provide the voice over internet protocols so all the phones out there from a from a Boyd standpoint we're working with that our K. twelve network we are continuing to make sure our K. twelve network continues to provide we we started off initially in twenty fifteen. Twenty kilobytes per student we are now up to one Meg per student we're actually looking at the possibility of taking that three as the as the need for data from students grows and grows we are trying to stay ahead of that curve. we operate the statewide network and we operate the wifi services all around the state from a cyber security standpoint I know that is fresh on everyone's mind from a cyber security standpoint we are responsible for creating the policies and standards and the departments we're working on making sure that we look at the state as a whole and one of the things that I challenge all of our folks is when you have a problem. even if it's not in our jurisdiction so to speak. If you have a problem and let's just say stock guard Arkansas it's stuck art comma Arkansas it doesn't matter if it's stuck art it's not what matters is that it's the state of Arkansas and it reflects on the state of Arkansas so even though my my teams jurisdiction so to speak is the departments around the state we're going to help all of our local municipalities or counties our schools because there's always that comma Arkansas so that's that's the mantra of our team that's our aim of how we and so as we're starting to establish standards that our schools can use that are counties can use that our cities can use what we're doing is mitigating their risk and what we're doing is is is trying to make sure that our folks are protected the bad guys are always going to be there but our folks are protected and we mitigate that risk as best we can we're doing that is with the executive branch K. twelve we're building an incident response team of times we're having to teach to use third parties for that but we're building an incident response team that can do that here in Arkansas and then our team is also administering the female cybersecurity grant at that goes to all of the local municipalities counties and schools it cannot. it is it is not being you can use twenty percent of it that the at the state level we've elected to only use five percent of that at the state level and push that out to the locals I'd rather that I'd rather that money go out to the locals so will be doing that from a standpoint of training floating all the boats so to speak getting everyone up to speed on the the types of standards that we need to have the types of things that we need to to do to protect ourselves a lot of these things they don't cost a lot of money it's just a matter of making sure that we're doing things correctly so that's what our cyber team does and then we've got six eight to help if you got a problem six eight to help and and so we have call centers that handle that but again it all comes back to. Who's the customer here who is the customer is it an agency is that the city is in a county is a school. We don't care who's the customer we want to make sure that we start treating folks like customers we act like retailers we act like a B. to B. business so that's the I. S. at a whole from a standpoint I apologize I rushed through that but I really did want to make sure that we have time for questions and also shall be I think are you going to speak to GIS or are we what what let's let's finish up with their department will move over to the the deal and Just from my perspective I wanted to say thank you for the work you've done I've been very impressed by what you've done with the agency over there you know the A. R. data is something that's based on legislation that this committee help pass back in twenty twenty seventeen twenty eighteen and seeing the fruits from that or or exciting and and you did speak about the cyber security would you introduce the cyber security officer an actual rooms everybody can kind of put a name with the face without sure. And then we'll maybe let him introduce himself Maybe at a future meeting maybe going a little more doubt but I at least want him to introduce himself to the committee and district just a couple seconds talk about the cybersecurity because that's going to be a big issue and I actually have legislation that'll be coming to the committee at some point on that sure thank you Mr chairman my name is Gerry Vance I've been with the state just just short of two years of my background is twenty five plus years and cyber and IT starting with department of defense and then moving into the private sector and most recently of the state of Arkansas so Johnson's Johnson said you know we we're heavily focused right now on trying to develop a set of statewide cybersecurity minimums and standards we feel like if we can if we can take and enter enterprise approach with with that will you know removing the. And in my private sector terms were removing all lines of business which would be K. twelve or a county or city sabar sabar you know the cyber standards in the cyber minimums and cyber policies apply unilaterally right they they you know bad actors are the you know they're not concerned about political affiliation or if you're a county or state agency so we have to take an enterprise statewide standards approach and so for me personally I take a very strong risk management approach to cyber everyone I've talked to folks Walker here today I like to speak in terms of risk and risk mitigation and risk reduction so that is that is one of the ways I I will have my conversation with Jonathan and others you know are we effectively managing our risk and I try to always put a risk context to cyber. Thank you John and kind of the of the other leg of that that school is one so standards are developed wanna make sure that our cities and counties and agencies have the proper training within the last aspect of it is to make sure those standards are in place which leads me of Mr call if you would stand up real quickly and out would you introduce yourself to the committee. Thank you my name is David goals I'm with Arkansas legislative audit I'm the supervisor over the I. S. audit function for audit we so we audit review security in the cities and counties K. through twelve higher education and state agencies we've been doing it for over twenty years and I work with Mr Askins in Mr Vance pretty closely we've developed a good rapport and I thank our end goal is security for the state of Arkansas you know Jonathan uses is common Arkansas to get him a shirt I thank that but I like where they're going to like we're going to see momentum and and thanks to use of the legislation that that been passed in the last few years has is in the right direction but it's ultimately the goal is is they'll develop the standards that Mr call the audit team will be able to audit to and then if the agencies are not following those standards that some point they get to come here to the legislature and explain why so that way we keep that accountability to make sure we're Being proactive and taking care of the citizens of Arkansas the of the the last thing I'll mention and then we'll go to go to questions at all but I wanted to shout out is on our K. twelve network Arkansas we we don't have on this enough we were one of the first states in the country to get all of our schools connected into date we still have some of the fastest speeds and best service to our schools in the country and so I just wanna make sure we get that out there so you all know what a success story that's been that. We get a kind of a reputation for being a rule state but that doesn't mean we can't be first in these technologies and so I appreciate everyone's everyone's work there we're gonna go to questions of representative brown I think you were referred questions. Thank you Mr chair Mr Askins and you might have already touched on this and it just went right over my head but you know we're talking about a data sharing amongst agencies are we getting to the point now where we can start maybe Well one of the examples to work with examples one of the examples we talked about is when you have a parent who is not paying their child support. Are we gonna be able to go over and look and see if that parent Hispana hunting or fishing license and find out their new their address because a lot of DO go huntin Fishin okay so are we gonna be able to do that soon yes ma'am that that will depend on the various agencies involved or the departments involved but anytime you create a a statewide longitudinal data source like we have our system like we have that does stitch together the different identities and it does stitch together the different representations or associations they have with the state of Arkansas the good the from a from a delivery of service standpoint that will certainly enable us to deliver services more efficiently but also and this is where I talked about maybe cost avoidance it will help us to understand where the waste is with the fraud is where the abuses so there's really two prongs to that system being able to deliver services more efficiently and the second is we can understand where the waste is and we can work to eliminate that so yes ma'am this our system does enable that yes ma'am thank you one other comment and I'm our chair did not mention it but he's here his vision was at it at some point in the future that a resident of Arkansas could go online and renew their driver's license register their vehicle get their fishing less all those things in one spot without having to go to each other disposition and and when I say think like a retailer that's how retailer with thank a retailer would think how do I make it easy for the citizens of Arkansas to do business with Arkansas and so yes ma'am that is that I share that vision that and as I said that's a tough issue because sometimes the easy on the top there. It's a lot of connection on the bottom but that is that is a very good vision and and I said I would support that thank you. And along with that I know you've got to come here on your your paper areas with all this data going back in form not only is the cyber concerned but the privacy of that citizen is concerned so we do have a chief privacy officer to make sure that is all protected them wondering if you could just talk about that for a minute and I've and I think our chief privacy officers in the room and can do that introduction as well sure and and and I apologize I did. Skip to pay just give Jennifer Spain Jennifer sorry. But from a privacy standpoint Jennifer looks at all of the data sharing agreements that we have in place she make sure that from that not only from a just of your privacy of P. II but she make sure that we're doing things for a good data stewardship standpoint who are the biggest were two of the users how they use in the state where is the data going all those things are huge concerns from us not only from a privacy standpoint but also from a security standpoint so Jennifer worked very closely with Gary and in terms of making sure that privacy meshes with security and they were being very good stewards with P. I. health whatever type of data that we have that that we're making sure we're in compliance and if you wanna come out real quick introduce yourself to serve everyone knows. Not really. RT privacy officer is shot. Jennifer Davis. Jennifer Davis of your state's chief privacy officer okay does anybody have any questions related to this. All right scene I would appreciate your your service to the state thank you. All right now any other questions for Mr Askins this morning. Okay represent their. We're talking about shared services just a second ago. All of fiber that being placed on the interstate up and down the interstate. As the department transportation ever. Consulted with you guys and maybe quickly you could use some of those fibers that they're getting for. For a right of way of to go from a to B.. Well I would like I would a gland talk to that for more for broadband standpoint but I will say that as transportation and and we're building up a good reporter with DOT Charles brown their CIO and myself have a conversation about once a week I will say that has that farmers being laid regardless of who that vendor is or who the operator is on that from a standpoint of we're beginning to understand that we've used a lot of different providers to be able to provide fiber connectivity to our parks really for the first time so as they are starting to spread out branch out we are being able to utilize that. Senate your question well the it's my understanding there's a lot of dark fibers they're negotiated with the highway department. For the right of way traded for the right of way instead of dollars right then there's this looks like there are some opportunities there to be able to use some of those dark fiber to run some of our own debt of they contrary to the highway department believe those. DO blown to the state in my opinion. It looks like that there's of some opportunities there for. So we have to explore that. Well I don't know Mr Heidi is that something you want to add real quick I think not offense Mr Robert shall we want to go too far down today but if you've got a few brief comments to maybe help the representative of the yes the president I can now we say program director I so it started this one August night my previous in Louisiana I know that UT down there was not a very fond of sharing its assets with state funded projects that we would normally do through our grant programs now I think you make a very good point that would be something that I would much like to explore with IDOT here in Arkansas so those conversations we can have and I would I would welcome those conversations we have not had them to date at this point. Okay any other questions the Committee. All right saying the gentleman thank you for your presentation in your service and we'll look forward to learning more in the future at this time I'd like to call up our GIS director and let him introduce himself and any of his staff and just to approve overview of his department. Good afternoon I'm shall B. Johnson the director of our state's geographic information system I've got the coolest job in the world and I wanted to share with you some of our history we're a little over twenty years old and we were actually born out of this committee in about two thousand to two thousand three time frame back in that era a lot of different apartments in the state were building geographic information system data and there became a recognition that it is costly a bill that data and it would make great sense if we did it in a coordinated fashion or coordinated way and so we developed a really catchy tag phrase that's really easy to remember and that's kind of what we've followed in its create it once and then reuse it a bunch and that's what we do we act as a warehouse and distribution center for your state geographic information that goes for addresses roads boundaries of all kinds including legislative districts elevation terrain transportation water utilities except for a and what we're able to do is we're able to work with local government we roll up that data to the state and then coordinate it to a standard and then publish it so they can be reused I want to give me a really good example reach out. Last week to my one of my colleagues we we tend to always talk about examples were different to agencies within the state share and re use this information but I thought I would try to share a story about how to use outside of the state government so I reached out to my colleagues said Arkansas one call so if you're going to dig somewhere in Arkansas you must call this number and ensure that you don't tear up underground infrastructure of all sorts kinds of telecommunications gas water electric someone. Arkansas one call uses geographic information to query where is that address for that locate but then who service territory does it fall in. And they use our data to be able to do that in last week's a processed over seven thousand six hundred locate requests in Arkansas and they use geographic information systems to be able to process that request very quickly analyzed where is this locate request that and then who do we assign it to and what utilities need to be contacted so that's a really good example of how the this coordinated data is published in a central warehouse and then it can be using shared by a lot of a lot of different folks in state local government and private sector K. twelve and also higher is we're pleased to support our colleagues and all the other agencies and departments of I'm not mention we work very closely to support a gland in the broadband location challenges as well as the most recent projects that his team was sponsoring to push through those dollars out to those providers to build out additional infrastructure so we place very small role in that helping to map that so that providers can understand where the areas were that they were bidding on those are a couple of quick examples of how we help support of both our departments in the state and then local government and then private sector as well I know I I know what time it is so I'm gonna stop right there to see if there's any questions so I am just come under example along those lines if I type in an address on my phone because I'm trying to get some place and it drops a pen right on top of that building that initial data came from your agency correct well actually no no okay we'll be came from the address an authority in one of our counties are one of our cities when they then do is they share it up with the state and then we were house and publish it to a common standard but yes it it ultimately does run through through us we I'm not also added thanks probably important that we we also try to share it with the private sector so Google. Apple for example are both huge consumers of that location data that is used by all the consumers that have that on their smart devices we try to share that with them sometimes they don't take it as fast as we would like but our biggest challenges are coordinating those unique situations where we've got a missing road or missing address things like that happen quite a lot. It in in the at one point we didn't have all seventy five counties done but I think that has been accomplished is that correct we so I wanted to outstanding we're getting close items that thank you for asking that softball we've got in Independence County on the address file is they're they're nearly done and then the other county that we're waiting on address files coming County we got it last week and then on our tax parcel file which I can't tell you how many times it's use we we monitor that service and it's something on the order of ninety million views year that particular file the only county remaining in Arkansas's Fulton County and so we're almost we're we're drawn in on get it all done excellent action all right uh said president of hockey of course it's not really question it rather than thank you Mr moto it's not really a question I just gonna say somebody uses GIS all the time as a local real estate guy and Seling county I've actually had clients here written within the last three weeks that are from out of state they're looking to bring their business to to Arkansas get on the GIS system and yeah you guys recently did an update I guess within the last year some of the stuff and they they even said that the R. GIS is probably one the best in the south because they've used others and it was outstanding so as one commend you for that thank you very much for very pleased here that feedback thank you thank you have a we've got a lot of great things happening in our state and sometimes our citizens don't don't know all the success story so I appreciate you bringing that to us any other questions from the committee. All right hearing none Mr Shelby thank you and thank you for the work you do colleagues saying no other business before the committee we are adjourned.