Bill to eliminate technology office advances in House

BYLINE: BY MICHAEL R. WICKLINE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The state's Office of Information Technology and chief information officer post would be axed under a bill that made it through an Arkansas House committee on Thursday.

House Bill 2586 by Rep. Daryl Pace, R-Siloam Springs, would divide the office's responsibilities between the state Department of Information Systems and state Department of Finance and Administration.

It also would split the chief information officer's duties between the directors of these two agencies, effective July 1, 2007.

Richard Weiss, director of the finance department, said the chief information office job has existed since 2001 when the Legislature created it as a separate office at the urging of then-Gov. Mike Huckabee.

The position has been vacant since Jan. 9 because Gov. Mike Beebe decided not to reappoint Doug Elkins, who had held it since March 2004. Elkins was paid $166,617 a year.

"I'm not really sure what lasting result came from that office," Weiss told the Committee on Advanced Communications and Information Technology.

The state can operate smoothly "without having this ivory tower approach downtown," he said, referring to the chief information officer's office in the Union National Plaza building in downtown Little Rock.

During the past several years, lawmakers have periodically questioned whether the chief information officer post was worth the expense.

Elkins' predecessor, Carolyn Walton, served from August 2002 through March 2004 when she left to become Wal-Mart's vice president of corporate systems.

The state's first chief information officer, Randall Bradford, was fired by Huckabee in 2002. Bradford had given his two weeks' resignation notice shortly before Huckabee dismissed him. Bradford had told a Huckabee aide he planned to publicly discuss problems with the Arkansas Administrative Statewide Information System, the state's computerized accounting system.

In December, the Joint Committee on Advanced Communications and Information Technology recommended merging the information systems department and the information technology office. The office was created inside that department in 1997 and became a separate agency in 2001.

Last month, Beebe appointed the information systems department director, Claire Bailey, as interim head of the information technology office. She's paid $117,599 a year.

Pace said the Beebe administration provided the details for his bill.

Under the bill, the information systems department would be responsible for monitoring information resource security issues and helping in the development of an information technology security policy for state agencies.

The bill would give the finance department the duties of developing rules governing the retention and management of public records commonly found in most state agencies and developing policies for state agencies to follow in developing information technology plans and budgets.

The information technology office has 21 authorized jobs and a $2.5 million-a-year budget.

Beebe has proposed transferring nine of the office's positions, including those in the Geographic Information Office, to the information systems department and five to the finance department. Seven of the positions would be eliminated under this plan, and four of those are filled, said Bailey.

Weiss said these changes would save the state about $1 million a year to help pay for tax cuts enacted by the Legislature this year.

The Legislature has enacted about $200 million a year worth of tax cuts.

This article was published 03/18/2007