Jim Rosica
A House bill aimed at shaking up the state’s Agency for State Technology was vetoed Friday by Gov. Rick Scott.
Sources earlier had told Florida Politics the measure (HB 5301), backed by state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, could fall under the Governor’s veto pen.
It passed both chambers this Legislative Session with only 13 total votes against it. In part, Ingoglia had complained the state’s data center costs were “escalating out of control.”
But James Taylor, executive director for nonprofit Florida Technology Council, criticized an earlier version of the bill in a StateScoop.com story this April.
“The only thing this truly does is put Florida further behind,” Taylor said. “When you’re trying to fix something, it is always more expensive in the beginning. And that’s where we’re at right now.”
The House had angled for a major overhaul, even doing away with the agency, but agreed to keep it intact during budget negotiations.
The agency came under fire in January after a report by Florida Auditor General Sherrill F. Norman’s office laid out a laundry list of security and other problems at the relatively new agency.
Jason Allison resigned as Chief Information Officer in February. He joined the Foley & Lardner law firm as a “director of public affairs” in the Tallahassee office.
The agency, which replaced the predecessor Agency for Enterprise Information Technology, was created by lawmakers in 2014. Allison was appointed its head that Dec. 9. He was paid $130,000 a year.
Among the audit findings: The AST failed to “review user access privileges for the mainframe, open systems environments, and the network domains,” kept an inaccurate “inventory of IT resources at the State Data Center,” and “State Data Center backup tape records were not up-to-date and some backup tapes could not be located and identified.”
Ingoglia, a Spring Hill Republican, previously explained that the agency won’t be abolished: It “is going to stay,” he said.
The bill reduces the agency’s “top-heavy” management structure, eliminating “the deputy executive director, chief planning officer, chief operations officer, and chief technology officer.”
It also requires the agency head, the state’s Chief Information Officer, to have 10 years of “executive management experience.”
A provision to move more information to cloud computing earned criticism from Government Technology this May. The website said it “cripple(s) the enterprise structure, allowing data center customer agencies to unilaterally move to cloud solutions.”
