Advanced Communications and Information Technology - House
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Bills discussed (1)
| Bill | Title | Sponsor | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
|
HB1557
Act 480
· 3 mentions in transcript, agenda, chapter
Matched: “Committee. Representative, you are recognized to present House Bill 1557. Thank you, Chairman. I'm going to go”
|
TO AMEND THE DUTIES AND POWERS OF THE DIVISION OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS CONCERNING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. | R. Scott Richardson | Notification that HB1557 is now Act 480 |
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Committee. Representative, you are recognized to present House Bill 1557. Thank you, Chairman. I'm going to go
Scott Richardson
Unverified
0:11
ahead and ask our friends from the agency to come up, if that would be okay? Sure. Go ahead. If you all want to come
on up, and once you get seated, if you gentlemen would please introduce yourself to the committee. Gentleman and lady, excuse me.
Gary Vance
Unverified
0:45
Vance, state chief information security officer. Jennifer Davis, state
Speaker 10
0:49
chief privacy officer. I was like, what is my position? And I'm a staff attorney
Scott Richardson
Unverified
0:58
for the department. Okay, representative. All right. I am Scott Richardson, House District 13, and we're presenting House Bill
1557 today. I just got out of state agencies a little while ago, and we had 1549, which a few of you are already on this one.
This is a similar bill in concept. The idea is that we have a number of areas within the state that need better governance, oversight, and we have established, I believe Representative Meeks, maybe your bill or previous, we established the Division of Information Systems, and it's called the... We're changing that to Office of State Technology,
to oversee or at least to provide support and technologies. This is an expansion or, I guess, kind of the idea of maybe a completion of that overall concept, bringing more of the responsibilities for that oversight and implementation within that organization. We do, in the bill, you get a number of responsibilities. I'm going to let you guys ask questions associated with that. I'm not going to get into any of the specific meat right now other than to say that we do allow for in the bill
or actually assigning the bill oversight for a lot of this stuff back into this committee to make sure, actually as a joint committee, but to make sure that we do have understanding. Some of the things that I like to particularly point out, project management, If you've been associated with ALC, you oftentimes are actually regularly we see expansion of IS projects, information system projects, scope creep associated with some sort of new find
or potentially an unidentified piece of the scope. And so there's this effort to come back to ALC, get an amendment to their contract, And these things can be significant in size, anything from, you know, a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands, if not more. I've questioned those in ALC a number of times this last year, trying to get some understanding around project management. Who in the state is responsible for overseeing and understanding what's happening with our projects?
Beyond that, who's responsible for ensuring that the projects that we're working on as a state actually fulfill the guidelines of where we're trying to go? What are those guidelines? What should we be working on? We have a finite amount of money in our state, of course, and so where should we be spending those dollars to get the biggest bang for that? And so we need a centralized point of project management that can oversee that and say, hey, these are the guidelines for this year that we're going to approve projects. make sure everybody's on board with that obviously there are federal requirements there's federal
stipulations those things are going to end up with some priority but there's other things that we need to be trying to accomplish where are we trying to go what are we trying to do this
Speaker 15
4:16
bill gives us the latitude within our technology
Scott Richardson
Unverified
4:19
department of technology i still can't can't do it office of ost yeah ost within the office of state technology
to oversee that project management and have a centralized point for understanding what information systems, technology-related projects that we have
and then ensuring that we manage those to completion, that we get good scopes on the front end, that we ensure that we don't have a lot of scope creep during the project and make sure we stay on task and on budget. So those are the kind of ideas within the bill. And
with that, I'll be happy to attempt to field questions along with the experts to my right.
Okay. And, uh, director, do you want to make any comments on the bill before
Speaker 8
5:02
we go to any questions? Uh, sure. Um, so I know about a month ago
Speaker 19
5:07
I presented to this committee, you know, where DIS was on some things and, um, you know, we were already in the process of working with Richardson, representative Richardson and Meeks on, uh, working up this legislation from that.
And I think, you know, one of the things that I talked about was from the McKinsey study, the Arkansas Forward study, there's 118 ongoing IT projects within the state currently, is what McKinsey has found. And about 18 of those really only have a significant impact on, you know, where the state's heading. Some of them, like Representative Richardson said, some of them are federal mandates, so those are probably some of the smaller ones. But there's really no oversight on what we want our IT resources to be working on
from a state perspective. We don't really have a – every biennial there are IT plans that are submitted and reviewed, but there's no really committee to sit down and look and say and prioritize these things on how the state wants to spend their money from an IT budget perspective. And so that's kind of what this bill does. It puts in governance and forms that governance team to be able to, you know, basically look at the projects that are you know coming up for the next couple years and prioritize those based off of risk and the impact to
the citizens. So kind of a synopsis is as state
agencies are buying equipment we don't want them to have a hodgepodge of equipment all over the state and who knows what kind of security standards this is trying to we're trying to standardize the equipment that the the agencies are purchasing to make sure it has the proper cyber security uh you know stuff in place uh and to make sure we're unifying to what we're doing what we're putting out
Scott Richardson
Unverified
7:01
there um i think my if i could i
i'll add to that um mr chairman the the that that's all part of it but it's also about understanding what software implementations that
we currently have within the state that may satisfy the requirements of a another agency and then trying to leverage those to be more cost effective instead of going out and purchasing a an additional piece of software or maybe even the same software at an additional cost so part of this is is understanding as a as a from a from a high-level perspective what we
have and how can we better use those assets throughout the state okay I was
Representative Austin McCollum
Unverified
7:44
on calling you have a question thank you mr. chair thank you represent for bringing this in front of us I like I like what you're trying to do here this is more just curiosity on the last page on the purchase price of the product is the $5,000 mark? Curious. And then again, $5,000 but less than or equal to $20,000. Just that range. Curious of why, you know.
Scott Richardson
Unverified
8:14
So that's a good question. Thank
you for that. In large environments, you end up picking a dollar figure to say, okay, you're kind of empowered to go ahead and pull the trigger on these types of things. Generally, and I won't speak for the agency, but generally you publish some sort of approved list. Maybe these are laptops, right? If they're less than this, they're on the approved list, you can purchase it from this already defined outlet, and it's a standard process. You don't want all of these smaller purchases, and I get it,
$5,000 might seem like a lot, but it's a smaller purchase, to necessarily have to be micromanaged across the level, and I'll let Jake respond
Speaker 8
8:57
to that. Right. That's exactly right. I mean, we just kind of chose that dollar figure because what we're seeing
Speaker 19
9:04
around standardization, especially we're, you know, everything we're trying to run out of our state data center in West Little Rock or out of the Northwest Arkansas out of Lowell, that $5,000 mark kind of keeps
departments from buying servers, which usually fall within that $5,000 to $25,000 range. So that's kind of where we came up with that dollar figure to not allow that, but if it's on an approved list. So we'll have T-shirt size for laptops, desktops, and monitors, things that will already be pre-approved so that we don't slow down that process. But it's just really to kind of curtail some of the one-off server and storage and all that kind of stuff so that we can centrally manage that
Representative Austin McCollum
Unverified
9:53
lower the cost. Thank you. So it sounds like more or less we want to set the parameters somewhere and based off of the nature of these services or particularly the servers,
that's where we're laying it at. Correct. Thanks. Okay. Any other questions
Representative Rick McClure
Unverified
10:11
from members? Okay. Representative McClure. First of all, thank you. To say that our system is inefficient would be an underestimation.
to say that it's confusing would also be an underestimation. So thank you for addressing this. Do we have a five-year plan of what we think that we could
Speaker 8
10:36
accomplish in the next five years? We are, I mean, we are working on that. We actually, so our
Speaker 19
10:42
neighbor to the west, Oklahoma, they've done this, and it's taken them five or six years to fully implement everything.
Um, I'll throw out their number. They saved about $374 million, um, doing this centralization and this governance, um, from an IT perspective. Um, until we really do that full assessment, which is the first thing that we're, you know, that's on our a hundred day plan. Um, doing the, the full assessment of what we have out there because we don't know what we have out there right now. Each department keeps up with that on their own. Um, it's hard to say, but I mean, I do know, um, I'm trying to think of a good example well so um we have an enterprise agreement with vmware for virtualization
software for servers the department of education was doing their renewal we brought them underneath our enterprise agreement and saved them fifty thousand dollars last year um so just simple economy of scale from that perspective i mean it's it'll be millions of dollars that we can save for the
Representative Rick McClure
Unverified
11:46
state by standardizing i would just say with my very much outdated background in this particular area that number does not back me up because i think the return on the investment would be very very well down the road because we have we can't talk between agencies for inefficiency and ever
ever capacity we don't know what we would save just in in staff numbers not including all the hardware side of it but anyway thank
you sure so kind of a question following up on that i read a news article that when doge went into some of the state agencies that they found literally tens of thousands of software licenses that the federal government had purchased that nobody was using
tens of thousands i think it was like 35 000 or or more and just by eliminating those unused license they saved a lot of money what would this allow for y'all to do something similar here to make sure any licensing of software in the state is actually being
Speaker 8
12:52
used yes so yeah as we do our assessment we'll get you know
Speaker 19
12:56
user counts of what the software that we're using i'm already working with some of our software resellers to get listings of all the software licenses because
with state contracts most of it go through a couple companies or company or companies and so um i'm already working with them to get that listing and so you know once we kind of get it into a central repository then we'll be able to you know basically better define um you know what's really needed and also consolidate those into a single agreement instead of you know one department getting it from here one from here and sometimes maybe just ordering off the you know directly from the vendor if it's under twenty thousand dollars um so yeah we'll have that central repository um
and you're exactly right there we call it shelfware so basically you buy software and stick it on the shelf back in the day when it actually came on a cd or floppy disks in a box we called it shelfware um but yes there's
Speaker 35
13:56
i'm sure plenty of that out there all right
all right any other questions from the committee okay uh saying oh mr
Gary Vance
Unverified
14:04
rance do you have i was just kind of dovetail into the software efficiency well you know one of the other things that we're seeing as well is yes we have duplication of software but we also have software that's being purchased
and installed and implemented that is adversely affecting um you know uh an agency's ability and my ability out of the cyber office to detect and respond to certain threats. And so we've had situations where a piece of software was installed at the agency level that had me and my team ready to declare an all-out cyber attack
because this software was acting in an unnormal, adverse way. And it was doing things that we wouldn't, we just wouldn't authorize a piece of software to do. And so we discovered this through forensics and due diligence that what it all came down to was the purchase of a really cheap piece of remote access software that was, you know, that was acting maliciously almost.
But we were able to catch it and stop it. So it's a double-edged sword, so to speak. It's software efficiencies and then effectiveness as well of software that we're buying and installing. All right. Okay. Still seeing no questions from
the committee. We don't have anybody signed up to speak for or against the bill. Don't have a big audience here, but anybody in the audience like to speak for or against? All right. I didn't think we would. I'm seeing none. Representative, would you like to close for your bill?
Scott Richardson
Unverified
15:51
I would like to close for the bill. So this obviously is a good step forward in the right direction to sort of consolidate these things, to find some efficiencies. It is supported by the Arkansas First findings. They projected a large amount of money, and I'm not going to lie to you about how much that is because projections are just projections, but a significant amount of money by doing the simple things that we're doing here to bring some governance, bring the project management under a central house, and make sure that we have and are funding the things that are most important to our state.
So with that, I would appreciate a good vote, and I am closed, Mr.
Chairman. All right. Committee, you've heard an explanation of the bill. Do we have
a motion? Can I have a motion to pass? Any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Your congratulations. The bill has passed. And having
no other business before the committee, we are adjourned. Thank you, committee. Thank you.
Agenda
HB1557 R. Scott Richardson TO AMEND THE DUTIES AND POWERS OF THE DIVISION OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS CONCERNING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — ADVANCED COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - HOUSE, Mar 19, 2025 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Representative Stephen Meeks Chair
Unverified
Scott Richardson
Unverified
Speaker 8
Gary Vance
Unverified
Speaker 10
Speaker 15
Speaker 19
Representative Austin McCollum
Unverified
Speaker 29
Representative Rick McClure
Unverified
Speaker 35