The Florida Senate is considering a bill that would \u2014 for at least the fifth time in recent years \u2014 yet again reorganize the state\u2019s technology bureau. And despite the enormity of the state\u2019s IT problems, some current and former state officials are saying that unlike past efforts, this one might stick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 111-page bill<\/a> would attempt to solve many of Florida\u2019s longstanding organizational snags, including politicization of the technology office and its leader, the state chief information officer. It would absorb the functions of the current incarnation of the state IT agency, the Florida Digital Service, and form a centralized outpost for oversight and governance, like approving major technology procurements before agencies spend tens of millions of dollars on projects that in some cases drag out for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And with the new agency proposed to receive $177 million in general funding, it might also wind up better staffed and more stable than past reorganization efforts. When Florida Sen. Gayle Harrell, a Republican, introduced the bill to committee last week, she sounded ebullient about the prospect of the state\u2019s technological dysfunction being remediated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is a consensus that is coming together that truly is going to transform how we do information technology, how we interoperate,\u201d Harrell said during a presentation of the bill. \u201c\u2026 We are going to have one system, enterprisewide, that is going to be interoperable. The agencies are going to have independence, but with standards across the enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bill would create the Agency for State Systems and Enterprise Technology, or ASSET. But the changes the reorganization would bring wouldn\u2019t happen overnight, Harrell admitted, noting that the majority of its operations wouldn\u2019t begin until July 2026 and that it likely wouldn\u2019t be fully operational until 2028.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the slower cadence could be cause for optimism. Some sources told StateScoop that the quick fixes thrown together in past reorganizations were part of why they failed, as the core problems plaguing the state\u2019s IT \u2014 like its massive procurements, lack of centralized governance and failure to consider interoperability \u2014 weren\u2019t addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Harrell recalled joining the legislature\u2019s first technology committee in 2001 and creating Florida\u2019s original State Technology Office. Over the next two-plus decades, the division was the repeated casualty of political tugs-of-war as governors and lawmakers disagreed on where the office should sit and what sort of authority it should be allowed to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the while, IT contracts to replace major systems, some totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars, plodded along with no apparent end. Florida\u2019s new Medicaid information system, called Florida Health Care Connections, or FX, is expected to cost the state more than $1 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Florida\u2019s IT agency was moved and renamed, again and again<\/a>, each time given a new acronym and leadership structure, until in 2020, then- state Rep. James Grant, a Republican, reluctantly ended his re-election campaign<\/a> and agreed to head the latest iteration of the agency, the Florida Digital Service, as its CIO. In an interview, he recalled to StateScoop his initial reaction when the governor\u2019s office asked him to head the agency: \u201c\u2018I\u2019m not doing that. Hell no.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though the legislation doesn\u2019t yet have a companion bill in the House, it seems to be well supported in the Senate, including by its Republican president, Sen. Ben Albritton. The legislation would also need to clear the desk of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential challenge given one key change that would move the technology office out of the governor\u2019s office and place it under the authority of the governor and the Cabinet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOver the years, we\u2019ve had iterations of trying to put together a systemwide approach to our IT, to establish, standards, architecture, procurement. And you know what?\u201d Harrell said during last Thursday\u2019s hearing. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t worked. It has. Not. Worked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant, who served as state CIO until the summer of 2023, turned out to be right about not wanting the job. He called it \u201cthe most hellacious three years of my career, and it\u2019s not even close.\u201d On his LinkedIn profile, Grant describes his time in Florida\u2019s executive branch as \u201ca three year bar fight with bureaucracy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n With StateSoop, he shared numerous challenges he believes the bills must solve, citing a rotating door of \u201cgross, offensive stuff\u201d he observed during his tenure as CIO. The \u201cgross stuff\u201d was what he now publicly calls out<\/a> as \u201cfraud, waste and abuse\u201d and, sometimes, \u201coutright corruption.\u201d But just how much of those things are there in Florida?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cInfinity? Eleventy-trillion? I don\u2019t even know how to quantify it,\u201d Grant said. \u201cA single unelected House staffer could write proviso language to require [the Florida Department of Management Services] to renew an almost $20 million Microsoft purchase.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant said such \u201charmless-looking language\u201d regularly slides through the legislature because lawmakers are termed out of office by the time they grasp just how vendors and agency leaders have been hoodwinking them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey get the runaround from the agencies. They get the runaround from the industry. They\u2019re just getting a runaround no matter how you cut it,\u201d he said of Florida\u2019s legislators. \u201cNow I realize that the wrong person was at the podium. Now I realize what I didn\u2019t know to ask. I could dive in on technical stuff. I could dive in on policy stuff. But I failed to understand that the legislature is akin to a board of directors, and the actual operation of government is at the agency level.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant, who spent roughly a decade in Florida\u2019s legislature, cited a technique used by some agency heads of entering into a procurement right before the legislative session to legally avoid answering questions about their over-budget or otherwise troubled IT projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And Florida has had many troubled IT projects over the years. The state abandoned an overhaul<\/a> of its financial management system in 2007 after dumping $89 million into the project. Florida\u2019s aged unemployment insurance system repeatedly crashed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Florida has had continued issues<\/a> with its electronic toll collection system, SunPass, including bugs that led to the state overbilling drivers, losing the state $50 million<\/a> in revenue, to say nothing of the project’s development itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In October 2020, the pop star and actress Ariana Grande urged her fans<\/a> in Florida to vote in the presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, crashing the state\u2019s voter registration website<\/a>. Grant, six weeks into his new CIO job, was ordered by the governor to fix the problem immediately. But, he said, he didn\u2019t have any access to the application and he didn\u2019t have credentials to access the floor of the data center where it was housed. And it was a colocation data center, which meant the data center\u2019s operators couldn\u2019t give him the access he needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWho\u2019s actually responsible for that application, network and infrastructure? In Florida, the answer is almost always lots of faceless people,\u201d Grant said. \u201cAnd then the state CIO has to sit at a podium and answer all the questions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant said Florida IT\u2019s dysfunction is a product of the state\u2019s \u201cstakeholder islands\u201d \u2014 agencies, politicians and lobbyists each with competing incentives and varying blind spots. He said some people mean well, but others cynically capitalize on disorganization and misunderstandings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He recalled an episode in which he\u2019d angered an industry lobbyist by opting to use the state\u2019s pre-negotiated cooperative purchasing agreements, rather than pursue a large IT procurement. Such agreements, like one offered by the nonprofit National Association of State Procurement Officials, are common in state governments and favored by some CIOs for their lower costs and faster speed. Grant said the lobbyist began complaining to the legislature that he\u2019d broken procurement law. Grant said the lobbyist found credulous ears and he \u201clost a lot of traction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But those large, protracted projects are at the root of the state\u2019s technological woes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEverybody is sick and tired of projects that are running 25% over timeline, 25% over budget, oftentimes never going live,\u201d Grant said. \u201cThey\u2019re just these time and material boondoggles. They\u2019re all the exact same playbook. Some big [service integrator] wins a deal, it fails and then they get blacklisted, the other SI shows up and says \u2018We\u2019re the good guys that\u2019ll do it.\u2019 They get the next one and the same thing happens over and over and over again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The proposed reorganization is designed to fix the broken cycle, to put a CIO at the center of the state\u2019s IT organizational chart, someone who can spot problems before they spiral out of control. Harrell said agencies will retain “independence,” but be held accountable to standards set by the new agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant said his power to influence outcomes as CIO was extremely limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat I didn\u2019t know was how much the agencies could obstruct the state CIO,\u201d he said. \u201cThey could hide applications, they could not report metadata to a data catalog that was statutorily required and they could just sit back and let the lack of understanding get the state CIO in trouble. I had no idea [the Department of Management Services] could steal $1.8 million of my rate and prevent me from being able to hire without ever seeing it. I had no idea DMS could underfund a data center that\u2019s federally funded by 20% by screwing up the math. When I say absolute tire fire \u2014 absolute unmitigated tire fire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant recalled another incident in which the governor\u2019s office asked him to spend $8 million he didn\u2019t have. Confused, Grant looked into the request and discovered Florida\u2019s budgeting system didn’t account for the money he\u2019d already committed to spending, which meant the office didn\u2019t know how much money he had to spend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI tell people that if the Kremlin or [Chinese Communist Party] tried to develop an org chart and structure to sabotage technology in Florida, this would be too extreme,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019d be like, \u2018Man, they\u2019ll never fall for that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Former Florida Chief Information Officer Jamie Grant said the latest proposal to overhaul state IT has a lot of problems to overcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":70178,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20647],"tags":[18,103,273,3690,4788,5732,25131,25132,25501,25502],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[4696],"class_list":["post-70176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modernization","tag-fraud","tag-corruption","tag-florida","tag-legislature","tag-it-modernization","tag-state-it","tag-technology-news","tag-government-news","tag-abuse","tag-jamie-grant","author-colin-wood"],"yoast_head":"\n‘Gross, offensive stuff’<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
‘Who’s actually responsible?’<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
‘Tire fire’<\/h3>\n\n\n\n