Aug. 19, 2025 — Alan Macaluso, Ulster County Director and Information Security Officer, briefed the Legislature on the Department of Information Services’ push to align operations with industry standards, expand enterprise service management and pilot artificial intelligence tools for internal use.

Macaluso told legislators the department is aligning with frameworks including Technology Business Management, ITIL/ITSM and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to standardize terminology, improve training and scale service management across county departments. “These standards give us terminology and structure. They give us clear guidance and consistent practices,” Macaluso said during his presentation.

He described the county’s ongoing implementation of Halo ITSM, an IT service management platform with an enterprise service-management component that will be rolled out in phases. Macaluso said the department supports core enterprise applications (Tyler Public Safety, New World, OnBase, financial systems), provides wide-area networking and hosting with failover, vendor relationship management and 24/7 monitoring.

On artificial intelligence, Macaluso said the county has an “AI acceptable use policy in flight” and is piloting knowledge‑base and generative AI tools. He described work on “developing an internal large language model to host county documents, like policy documents or contract documents or standard operating procedures,” intended to allow staff to query dense internal documents while keeping the data on county premises. Macaluso said the county has assembled a proof‑of‑concept using older high-performance machines and expects to demo the system in the near future.

Macaluso framed the efforts as risk‑aware and standards-based: “We align to the NIST 2 Cybersecurity Framework … so we can control risk based on some of those larger practices,” he said. He also noted partnerships with federal and state cybersecurity partners, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and New York State ITS. No formal legislative action was taken during the presentation; Macaluso’s briefing was provided for information and follow-up questions were offered by legislators.

The department said it will return with additional detail as the Halo ITSM rollout and AI pilots progress.