Senator Brock urges continued state IT oversight, cites inventory gaps and past system failures

Senator Randy Brock, a member of the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee, told the Senate Committee on Institutions on Jan. 28 that state information-technology oversight has improved since JITOC began in 2016 but still suffers from incomplete inventories, fragmented leadership and residual high-risk systems.

Brock said the committee’s early work established basic priorities—counting systems, rating security and identifying which applications needed repair—but that the effort was limited by time and resources. “There was no independent or truly independent, chief information officer for the state… and you sort of had the wild veil,” Brock said, describing a history in which projects were developed inside agencies without enterprise coordination.

The matter matters because the state’s core services depend on numerous interlinked systems. Brock told senators that JITOC produced an initial inventory and used a red/yellow/green rating to…