Chief tech officer unfazed by criticism, says online video a non-issue

By Travis Perry│Kansas Watchdog

OSAWATOMIE, Kan. — The Kansas Legislature’s chief information technology officer is pushing back against recent complaints lodged by state senators, and says his staff is unequivocally ready to bring online video to the Capitol.

Jim Miller, legislative chief information technology officer, says he gets the frustrations. While he might take issue with the context and applicability of criticism over the 2011 rollout of Kansas Legislative Information Systems and Services — KLISS, the state’s legislative bill software backbone — he understands why the complaints exist.

But when it comes to technological feasibility, he says KLISS and online video aren’t even close.

“These efforts occupy two completely different universes in terms of degree of difficulty,” Miller told Kansas Watchdog.

Miller said that while online video gets plenty of hype with the media and the public, “it is technically straight forward.”

KLISS, on the other hand, not so much.

“Implementing KLISS was and continues to be, as we still have lots of work to do, an enormous, integrating, enterprise wide change management effort,” he said. “The KLISS implementation was operationally painful, premature and technically difficult resulting in large doses of cultural trauma, the residue of which manifests itself on occasions in the negative commentary you heard.”

While the Legislative Office of Information Services has received much of the blame for KLISS’ initial troubles, the program was built by Propylon, a Lawrence-based company.

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