Florida CIO confirmed by state Senate
The Florida Senate confirmed Chief Information Officer Jason Allison Thursday, after he spent more than a year and a half in the position in an unofficial capacity.
The state’s first official chief information officer in five years, Allison will continue to serve as executive director for the nearly 2-year-old Agency for State Technology as part of his post. There, Allison leads 241 full-time employees and directly oversees $73 million of IT spending in state government. The mission of the agency is to “maximize resources, saving taxpayer dollars and delivering more efficient and effective constituent services in the Sunshine state,” according to a release from the agency
While awaiting confirmation in October, Allison told StateScoop that the state was preparing a push for open data — one that involved working with the Legislature to hire a chief data officer and a team of data scientists to take a leadership role to help use data to aid the executive branch and other state agencies.
When the Agency for State Technology officially kicked off operations in July 2014, Gov. Rick Scott named Allison interim CIO and officially nominated him for the job later that year. Prior to AST’s launch, Florida went three years without a CIO after the predecessor state Agency for Enterprise Technology shuttered in 2011.
Before coming to AST, Allison was the information technology policy coordinator in the state Office of Policy and Budget. Allison also served as the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s CIO
