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DHHS Information Services details IT portfolio, flags unfunded BI/AI and e-sign priorities
Summary
The DHHS Bureau of Information Services told legislators about projects that support department-wide data and productivity improvements, including Salesforce deployments, an enterprise BI platform, privacy impact assessment work and a prioritized but unfunded DocuSign e-signature subscription.
Ernie Gillen, director of the Department of Health and Human Services Bureau of Information Services, briefed the House Finance Division 3 on the agency’s IT portfolio, road map and staffing.
Gillen described his bureau’s core functions: strategic planning for IT investments, portfolio and project management (the PMO), asset management, business intelligence and data governance, and information-security and privacy governance. He said BIS manages roughly 30 departmental systems and has been building shared platforms (for example Salesforce deployments used for constituent inquiries, incident reporting and other case management functions) to reduce duplication across divisions.
Gillen and Nathan White described several projects that the department prioritized in the agency budget submission but said some did not appear in the governor’s recommendation. These priorities included an extension of the BI environment (that supports federal draw and quality reporting), continued Salesforce development and an e-signature (DocuSign) subscription that staff said measurably accelerated contract execution during the pandemic. White and Gillen told members they would provide quantifiable cost/benefit analyses for key items requested by the committee.
The bureau also said it is integrating privacy-impact assessment capability and a OneTrust template to comply with statutes requiring privacy governance; the privacy team expects to be conducting PIAs for new projects beginning in March 2025. Committee members asked about AI and natural-language applications; Gillen said the department plans staged implementations that begin with non-sensitive public policy and administrative-rule documents to prove privacy controls before moving into systems that manage personally identifiable or health data.
Ending note: BIS staff said they are tracking 25–30 systems and that the PMO has created training and a center-of-excellence model for departmental project managers; lawmakers asked BIS to provide a concise business-case example (DocuSign) comparing consultant vs. full-time staffing costs and showing likely return on investment.
