Advanced Communications and Information Technology - House
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Bills discussed (1)
| Bill | Title | Sponsor | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
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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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- October 2, 2026
Scott Richardson
Unverified
0:18
Thank you, Chairman. Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and ask our friends from, uh, um, the agency to come up if that would be
OK. Sure, go ahead and if y'all want to come on up and once you get, uh, seated, if the gentlemen would please introduce yourself to the committee. Gentlemen
Speaker 8
0:45
and lady, excuse me. Uh, Jay Harton, director of DIS.
Speaker 10
0:53
Gary Van state, uh, chief information security officer. Jennifer Davis, uh, chief privacy officer. I was like, what
Scott Richardson
Unverified
1:03
is my position? And I'm a staff attorney for the department. OK, Representative. All right, I'm Scott Richardson, House District. 13, um,
and we're presenting, uh, That's Bill 1557 today. I just got out of uh state agencies a little while ago and we had 1549 which A few of you are already on this
one. This is a similar, uh, bill, um, in, in concept, the idea is that we have a number of areas uh within the state that need better governance oversight, um, and we have established, I believe, Representative Meeks, maybe your bill or uh a previous we established the division of Information Systems and, um, it's, it's called the Hopefully soon the offices. We're changing that to office of
State Technology, um, to, to oversee or at least to provide support and technologies. This is an expansion or or I guess a kind of the idea of maybe a completion of that overall concept, bringing uh more of the responsibilities for that oversight and and implementation within that organization, uh, we do in the bill you get a number of uh of responsibilities, um, I'm gonna 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 are actually assigned in the bill, oversight for a lot of this stuff, uh, back into this committee to make sure I actually as a joint committee but to make sure that we do have understanding some of the some of the things that I like to particularly point out, uh, project management, if you've been uh associated with uh ALC you oftentimes are actually regularly we see, um, expansion of, of IS projects, information system projects, um, scope creep
associated with uh um uh some sort of new find um or potentially an unidentified piece of the scope and so we, um, there's this effort to come back to ALC get an amendment to the contract, and these things can be significant in size, anything from, you know, a few $1000 to hundreds of thousands if not more, um, I've questioned. those in ALC a number of times this last year trying to get some understanding, uh, around project management, who in, in,
in the state is responsible for overseeing and understanding um what's happening with our projects. Beyond that, who's responsible for, um, ensuring that the projects that we're working on as a state actually fulfill the guidelines of where we're trying to go, where are the, what are those guidelines? What should we be working on? We have a out 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 bill gives us
Speaker 15
4:21
the latitude within um. Our technology department of technology.
Scott Richardson
Unverified
4:24
I still can't, can't do it, off of OST, yeah, OST, um, uh,
in within the office uh of state technology to oversee that project management, have a centralized point for understanding what, uh, information systems technology related projects that we have and then ensuring that we, 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, um. So those are the kind of the ideas within the bill and with that.
I'll be happy to attempt to field questions along with uh.
The experts to my right. And, uh, director, do
Speaker 8
5:07
you want to make any comments on the bill before we go to any questions? Uh, sure. Um,
Speaker 19
5:12
so I know about a month ago 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 uh, uh, talked about was, um, from the McKenzie study, the Arkansas Forward study.
Um, there's 118 ongoing IT projects within the state currently is what McKenzie has found and about 18 of those really only have a significant impact on, you know, where the state's heading, um, some of them, um, like Representative Richardson said some of them are federal mandates, so those are probably some of the smaller ones, um, 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, um, 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, um, you know, basically look at the projects that are, you know, coming up for the next couple of years and prioritize those, um, based off of risk and the impact. to the citizens.
So, uh, kind of a synopsis is as the state agencies are, 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 try to, we're, we're trying to standardize the equipment that the, the agencies are purchasing to make sure it has the proper cybersecurity, uh, you know, stuff in place, uh, and to make sure we're, we're, we're unified to what we're doing, and what we're putting out there. Um, I think my, if
Scott Richardson
Unverified
7:06
I could, I, I, I, I'll. Add to that, um, Mr. Chairman,
the, the, 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 ending as a as a uh from a from
a high level perspective what we
Representative Austin McCollum
Unverified
7:44
have and how can we better use those assets throughout the state. I think I'm calling, you have a question. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, uh, Representative for bringing this in front of us. I like, um, I like what you're trying to do here. This is more just curiosity on the last page on the. Purchase price of the products, uh, it's the $5000 mark, curious. And then again, 5000 but less than or equal to
Scott Richardson
Unverified
8:17
$20,000 just that range, curious of why,
you know. So uh that's, that's a good question, thank you for that. um, in large environments you end up picking a dollar figure to say, OK, you're kind of empowered to go ahead and pull the trigger on these types of things, um, generally, and I, I won't speak for the agency, but generally you publish some sort of approved list. Maybe these are laptops, right? Um, if they're less than this, they're on the approved list, you can purchase it from this already defined,
uh, outlet and just it's a standard process. You don't want all of these smaller purchases and, and I get it $5000 might seem like a lot, but it's a smaller purchase to necessarily have to be micromanaged, uh, across the level, and I'll, I'll let, uh,
Speaker 8
9:02
uh, Jake, respond to that as well, that's exactly right. I mean, we just kind of chose that dollar figure, um, because, um, what
Speaker 19
9:09
we're seeing, um, 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 north. West Arkansas out of Lowell, that $5000 mark, um, kind of keeps, um, departments from buying servers, which usually, you know, fall within that 5 to $25,000 range. Um, 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 from 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, um, server and storage and all that kind of stuff and send so that we can centrally
Speaker 29
9:55
manage that and use the economical scale to
Representative Austin McCollum
Unverified
9:58
lower the cost. Thank you. So sounds like more or less we want to set the parameters somewhere and based off of the nature of these surfaces or in particularly the er the servers that that's where we're landed at, OK,
thanks. OK. Any other questions from members? OK, Representative McClure. First of all, thank you.
Representative Rick McClure
Unverified
10:20
Uh, to say that, uh, our system is, uh, Inefficient would be an underestimation. To say that it's confusing would also be. underestimation, so thank you for addressing this. Do we have a 5 year plan of what we think that
Speaker 8
10:41
we could accomplish in the next 5 years. We are, I mean, we are working on that. Um, we actually, um,
Speaker 19
10:47
so our neighbor to the west, Oklahoma, they've done this and
it's taken a, it's taken them 5 or 6 years to fully implement everything. Um, I'll throw out their number they saved about $374 million doing the centralization and this governance, uh, 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 100 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 $50,000 last year. Um, so just simple economy of scale from that perspective. I mean, it, it's, it'll be millions of dollars that we can save for the state by standardizing.
Representative Rick McClure
Unverified
11:54
I, 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, uh, because we have, we can't talk between agencies for inefficiency and ever ever capacity. We don't know what we would say just in in staff numbers, not including all the hard hardware side of it, but anyway, thank
you. So, uh kind of a question
following up on that. Um, I read a news article that uh when Doge went into uh 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. Uh, 10s of thousands. I think it was like 35,000 or, or, or more. And just by eliminating those unused license, they saved a lot of money. Would, would this allow for you all to do something somewhere here to make sure any licensing of software
Speaker 8
12:57
in the state is actually being used. Yes, um, so yeah, as we do
Speaker 19
13:01
our assessment, we'll get, you know, user accounts of what the software that we're using, um, I'm already working with some of our software resellers to get listings of all the software licenses. with state contracts, most of it go through. A couple of 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 $20,000. 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 call it shelfware, um, but yes,
Speaker 35
13:59
there's, I'm sure plenty of that out there.
Alright, right, uh, any other questions from the committee? OK, uh, saying,
Gary Vance
Unverified
14:09
oh, Mr. Rance, do you have a, 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, um, uh, an agency's ability, uh, and I, and my ability out of the cyber office to. To, to detect and respond to certain threats. And so we've had situations where uh you know a a piece of software was installed, um, at the agency level that had me and my team ready to declare an all-out cyberattack. Uh, because this this software was acting in a in an unnormal adverse way.
Um, and it was doing things that we wouldn't, we, we just wouldn't authorize a piece of software to do, um, and so we discovered this through forensics and due diligence that what it all came down to was the purchase of a really cheap. A piece of remote access software, uh, that was that, you know, that was acting uh maliciously almost, um, but we were able to catch it and stop it, but so it's a, it, it's 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. OK. Uh,
still saying no questions from the committee, we don't have anybody signed up to speak for or against the bill, um, don't have a big audience here, but anybody in the audience likes to speak for or against. All right, I didn't think we would. I'm saying no. uh, representative, would you like to close your your bill?
Scott Richardson
Unverified
15:56
I would like to close for the bill. um, this obviously is a is a good step forward in the right direction to sort of consolidate
these things to find some efficiencies. Uh, it is supported by the, the, um, Arkansas first findings, um, they projected a 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, uh, to bring some governance, um, bring the project management uh in under a central house and make sure that we have and and our funding the things that are most important to our state. So with that, I would appreciate a good vote and I am closed uh. Chairman.
All right. Committee heard an explanation of the bill.
Do we have a motion? Can you have a motion to uh pass. Any discussion on the motion? Saying none all in favor, say I. Any opposed? All right, congratulations. The bill is passed,
and, uh, having no other business before the committee,
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
Scott Richardson
Unverified
Representative Stephen Meeks Chair
Unverified
Speaker 8
Speaker 10
Speaker 15
Speaker 19
Representative Austin McCollum
Unverified
Speaker 29
Representative Rick McClure
Unverified
Speaker 35
Gary Vance
Unverified