Information Technology Council

AIF’s Information Technology Council (ITC) is a group of leading information technology and telecommunications companies representing all aspects of the technology industry. The Council includes service and support providers, IT systems integrators, hardware and software companies, consultants and re-sellers ranging from Fortune 500 companies to medium-sized and small businesses. The Council was created in early 2006 with the clear mission to convey the value of IT to Florida’s government as the state was falling behind in re-engineering its business processes used in delivering citizen services.

Council Priorities
The ITC’s 2012 legislative priorities are as follows:

• IT Governance – The Council supports a strong Chief Information Officer in the Executive branch to provide the leadership needed to allow the state to provide quality services to the citizens in the most cost efficient way possible. We strongly believe that information technology will offer the tools to re-engineer the state’s business processes to accomplish this goal. The Council will play an active role in helping shape legislation to implement the appropriate IT governance structure.

• Agency for Enterprise Information Technology (AEIT) – This agency’s mission is very important to all IT companies and therefore to AIF’s ITC. We will monitor all legislation referencing AEIT.

• Data Sharing – The need for data sharing between agency systems is very well documented and the technology to accomplish the sharing has been available for some time. The ITC will advocate for this issue as the cost of data sharing is significantly less than building new systems. In addition, many legislators have expressed the need to data share as soon as possible.

• Data Centers – The ITC supports an enterprise architecture governance structure for the state data centers. We believe the current structure is flawed with competing interests of stakeholders, competing data centers and competing Boards of Directors. We are concerned that there is no executable disaster recovery plan and the risk of significant outages is higher than it should be. We will advocate for changes in the governance of the data centers.

• Legacy Systems – AIF has publicly criticized the state for continuing to allow IT systems to become outdated. By adding new, advanced systems, the state could save in operational costs, as well as see an increase in security. Moreover, there is a much larger pool of IT professionals trained to control and maintain the newer systems. We realize that the state is in a serious budget crisis and innovative thinking is necessary to begin the process of replacing these old legacy systems.