OMES director says agency is 'turning the ship,' proposes statewide call center and real‑time purchasing monitoring

OMES Director Rose told a Senate appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday that the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) is “turning the ship” after organizational and customer‑service problems, and laid out a package of technology, staffing and budget requests that include a near‑real‑time purchasing‑oversight tool and a statewide call‑center platform.

Rose framed the presentation around OMES’s role as a shared‑services organization for state government, saying the agency’s mission is to “save the state money and support the other agencies as they work on their mission.” He told the committee he has changed OMES operations since taking the director role in September and described several planned or under‑way projects intended to improve purchasing controls, cybersecurity, payroll and citizen access to financial transparency data.

The committee heard that OMES has deployed a purchase‑monitoring tool the presentation repeatedly calls “Salonis” (presented as a near‑real‑time flagging system) that OMES staff say can detect mis‑coded or improper exemptions and review roughly $7,000,000,000 in transactions. Deputy Director Moore and other OMES staff described how the system flags requests that don’t meet exemption criteria, prompts requesters to verify, and escalates unresolved flags to a human reviewer. Rose said the platform also includes generative‑AI capabilities to speed procurement analysis.

Rose and his deputies proposed a statewide call‑center platform based on Amazon’s Connect product. OMES staff said the state currently counts about 3,000 call‑center agents across roughly 77 telephone trees, with perhaps five large physical call‑center operations; many agents work remotely. OMES presented an implementation cost estimate of about $14,000,000 up front, $4,000,000 year‑over‑year, and a projected recurring salary savings of roughly $40,000,000 annually if the platform reduces the human workload as modeled. Rose and Deputy Director Moore said OMES expects to pilot the platform within OMES and the tax agency first.

Several senators pressed on employment and local‑economic impacts. Senators asked whether reductions would come via attrition rather than mass layoffs; OMES said the expectation is to realize savings by not refilling positions over time and by repurposing or retraining staff, not through an immediate mass termination. OMES officials said they have not identified individual employees who would be cut and described the 1,000‑agent figure as an estimate based on observed reductions in similar deployments.

Other projects Rose briefed the committee on included cybersecurity, where he said OMES currently records tens of millions of daily attack events across the state attack surface (the presentation cited 57,000,000 per day), and a multi‑year Treasury system replacement for the state banking platform. OMES also described continuing costs for Workday and PeopleSoft (state human‑capital and financial systems), and a transparency/website modernization effort to make state financial data easier for citizens and lawmakers to use.

On funding, Rose identified categories OMES considers "unfunded" or "underfunded mandates"—statutory responsibilities or one‑time requests for which OMES says it lacks recurring appropriations. He said OMES will bring supplemental requests tied to specific statutes, and cited two items by bill number: Senate Bill 1121 (maternity‑leave reimbursement) and Senate Bill 1709 (the Statewide Volunteer Firefighter Program). He told senators those items had required OMES actions without corresponding dedicated appropriations.

Committee members asked about the governor’s executive order to return state employees to office and whether OMES can meet the February deadline. Rose said OMES has secured additional workspace and will provide a report identifying agencies or staff that cannot be returned because of space constraints; he said he will present costs and options to the legislature. OMES also described historical changes in headcount and said its overall FTE count has been relatively flat in recent years, while appropriations have risen when the legislature assigned specific projects to OMES.

Senators asked operational questions on accounts‑payable turnaround, capital‑project oversight fees and fleet management. OMES said accounts‑payable performance dashboards are in development and that its procurement‑cycle average had dropped from about 154 days historically to roughly 67 days. OMES acknowledged unfinished work on vehicle inventories and said it will evaluate whether leasing through private vendors (Enterprise) makes sense when OMES cannot match private pricing.

The committee session ended without formal votes. Senators thanked OMES staff and asked for follow‑up material on staffing, payroll and a number of dashboards and metrics Rose referenced.

Ending: Rose told the committee he welcomes follow‑up questions and offered to supply additional data the senators requested, and the subcommittee adjourned.