Keone Kali

There are parts of the state’s information technology system that were built before Keone Kali, 43, was even born.

Kali became the state’s chief information officer in February after the departure of Sonny Bhagowalia, for whom the CIO post was created here under former Gov. Neil Abercrombie. Much of the past three years — the first quarter in what’s projected as a 12-year project to overhaul the "legacy" IT system on which the state, frighteningly, depends — has been spent on planning.

And now it’s crunch time, otherwise known as implementation. Kali figures he has two years to get the worst of these systems retired.

"There’s kind of a failure window here," he said. "We’re so far beyond the end of life for some of these things that I give it two years before it’s irrecoverable data loss."

Kali graduated from Punahou School and UCLA and earned his stripes as CIO in Beverly Hills, which undertook its own IT transformation under his leadership. He met his wife in California (Kali is stepfather to two grown children). The couple moved to Maui where Kali handled tech for the Pacific Disaster Center.

But the big challenge is with the state, where Kali is now proposing a reorganization that will merge the Office of Information Management and Technology (OIMT) and the only other centralized element in the state’s fragmented IT system, the Information and Communication Services Division (ICSD).

That’s going to take some work with the Hawaii Government Employees Association (HGEA) and myriad state officials to negotiate. To this point, most OIMT positions have been temporary, he said, which is why there was some uproar over plans to phase old jobs out and new ones in.

He’s also launched the state’s IT "cloud," a virtual repository enabling many computer systems to be consolidated and backed up. And improvements to the state’s Web portals won a national award.

Kali said he plays music as one diversion from his day job, but that’s about to become all consuming. The state IT wranglers are in a race against time to stay ahead of computer breakdown.

"We’re at the point where it’s a full-scale sprint, every day, to start migrating legacy systems off, as fast as possible," he said. "So we’re in fact doing that. We’re burning the candle at both ends."

QUESTION: The positions that were eliminated, what was that about?

ANSWER: Our program has been underway for, we’re going into our fourth year. And we have a 12-year transformation plan that Sonny started, that we are executing on. And we are right in the midst of the full technology implementation phase of this plan. …

So due to changing requirements in our staffing levels and the skill sets that we need, we’re really programmatically changing our staffing requirements to have technical leads, technical system software engineers, to help us drive these projects and implement them, install software and get things going. So there’s a lot of hard work that needs to be done at this point. The staff that was in there before was largely focused on project management at the high level, project administration, and we’re deep into these implementation phases now.

Q: The skills needed, are they more … ?

A: More technical. Technical and more experienced in technology implementation at the large scale. …

All our positions in OIMT are at-will, exempt, appointed positions. And they’re temporary in nature. …

We have to be able to be flexible enough to change the requirements and the job descriptions as we get through different phases of these programs. It’s been a hard-won battle. Just to create these positions and establish them has taken two years.

Now reproposing them in the flight of a reorganization plan that we are submitting this year … there’s a lot to it. It’s not just the technology piece, it’s the restructuring of the organization for success, and to deliver a service organization for technology services statewide.

Q: Are those new positions going to be hard to fill?

A: Well, it’s always hard to fill positions in Hawaii with talent — the typical brain drain that everybody else talks about and experiences, the general gap in the IT high-level system engineering expertise in the state. We’ll post the positions and see what we get.

Q: What’s the time frame on filling these?

A: We’d like to fill them as soon as possible, but we have to get the positions posted, available to the public, hopefully this month, is our goal. …

We manage ICSD, which is a division of DAGS (Department of Accounting and General Services), which has 137 civil service positions. The OIMT positions are 39; they’re all exempt, at-will positions.

Q: This structure was born when, exactly?

A: I think (former CIO) Sonny (Bhagowalia) came in August 2011. And we delivered the 1,300-page plan in October 2012.

Q: The reorganization: It’s a merging?

A: It’s a merging, it’s a restructuring. … We’re mixing at-will exempt employees as well as civil service employees, and we have to deal with the HGEA, the union. We deal with the central agencies. … Much of the IT work in the state is done in the departments; it’s decentralized. So figuring out the reporting and the governance, it’s a big deal.

Additionally with that is reclassifying positions to more broadly banded salary scales for the skill sets that are out there now that we need to retain. …

The greater task is to redescribe the job descriptions in a way that accommodates what is being done now in those positions but opens the door for additional training of the civil service staff so they can reach these different, more professional levels of IT work. …

Q: Going back to the campaign era, one of the former governor’s criticisms was that the Legislature didn’t provide enough funding for implementing all this. Was that the case?

A: Everything new has its trials and tribulations. So when the Legislature’s appropriating money in the beginning, you’re basing it on expectations that were set against a very big plan and what people wanted to do. That’s how these things come into being. You build something from nothing.

We had several lump-sum appropriations and then programmatic appropriations that came through the last biennium budget period. But, yeah, it’s not to any amount that is going to do anything more than establish ongoing operations of these initiatives that we’ve been trying to do. …

For instance, if (OIMT) had a budget of $150 million, or $300 million, that would make a huge difference, because we could replace a lot of the legacy equipment, PCs, networks, things like that that are out there.

Q: Is it overwhelmingly hardware costs where you run short?

A: A lot of it is infrastructure, yeah. … They’ve been trying to wrap their minds around how to fund this, with what color of money, and what are the lasting impacts to doing this investment in technology. And certainly Gov. Ige understands the value of investing in technology in the long term.

So many of these short-term investments end up having long-term impacts. We’re trying to use capital improvement project money or GO (general obligation) bond money. We used definitely general funds and operating funds to do this. Some of the projects are coming through federal funds. Other money comes in from grant projects. So we’ve been beating the bushes and looking to develop some more sustainable budgets, how we do this.

But a lot of it’s commoditized. We spend a lot of time negotiating statewide licensing agreements that save the state a lot of money every year, by doing one agreement for the whole state. …

Q: Doesn’t everything have to be on the same platform for that to work?

A: Well, they have to be on the same network, essentially. And we’ve taken measures to beef that up. So the network is running to all agencies and departments now, and it’s running very reliably.

Next is centralize the servers, where the compute resources are. And we’ve built the government private cloud to accommodate that.

Q: For those of us who can’t quite grasp this, the advantage of putting things on "the cloud" is what? System security, in case one system goes down?

A: A lot of things. Capacity increases, they’re always 10- to 50-fold, in terms of storage and things. Even like email, for instance. We used to have a very limited amount of disk space to store email on. So you couldn’t do much with email. Our capacity on email has increased 50-fold in terms of storage of emails and things like that. …

The network’s another thing, where we’ve increased it 10-fold, in terms of the capacity of the network to operate. As soon as you have a network that is like a superhighway, you can actually do enterprise applications that serve many people. …

Q: Have any of the legacy systems been replaced yet?

A: Some, like the backup tape systems, have been replaced. The other things, like the mainframes, are scheduled to be replaced, but they have not yet been replaced.

Q: Is that a funding issue?

A: Yeah, it’s funding, and it’s also the stability of those systems. It’s difficult to touch them because they might break and forever be lost. You can’t forklift them, you can’t move them out of a closet in a building. You have to access them across the wire, back up the data and rebuild it and upgrade at the same time. Those projects take three to six months of dedicated effort by the civil service employees who are in the departments, as well as the ICSD folks to make that stuff happen.

But there are still systems out there that are over 45 years old.

Q: For example?

A: Inventory management system. Physical inventory. So like, desk chairs, furniture, office stuff, that system is nearly 50 years old.

There’s only one person who knows how to run it.

Q: Really?

A: Yeah.

Q: And how old is this person?

A: Oh, he’s got his max years of service already. When he inherited this system it was already 20 years old, and he’s put 30 years into it. …

That’s the attrition problem, right? … The folks who work on it started here as interns 35, 37 years ago. And they’ve worked their way up through branch chiefs and they’re experts on this stuff. And they’re ready to retire. The last people to touch this thing.