HB 1281: End Crashes with $10 Million for State Database Brittle Fund

The Joint Appropriations Committee is at least trying to solve some real problems. Their House Bill 1281 would put $10,000,000 into a new state brittle database fund, which would be used to track the sale and delivery of local peanut brittle to ensure state workers have an uninterrupted supply of sugary protein snacks on their desks.

I’ll take mine with choc… oh, wait—I misread that. HB 1281 creates a state database brittle fund. Evidently state offices are crutching along on all sorts of outdated databases and software that are really hard to maintain. Glitchy legacy software also makes it harder for state agencies to publish data to the web and share public data with the public. HB 1281 thus appropriates $10M to “replace or update applications and programs that are difficult or costly to fix or that  have a propensity to fail regularly, as well as to improve digital access to state agency information for the public.” HB 1281 also includes an emergency clause, allowing the Bureau of Information and Technology to get to work on beefing up and opening up our state databases right away.

Updating rickety software and making our databases more robust and open won’t suit Governor Noem, who is making hiding information a theme of this year’s Session. She’d probably prefer free peanut brittle on her shiny new state plane, on which Appropriations will consider spending $5M via House Bill 1282… which is also deemed an emergency. But data is the lifeblood of effective management, in the public sector as well as the private sector. If our data is locked behind database walls that only a couple experts in legacy code can access, and if the software providing that access crashes every hour, state employees and the public can’t get the data they need to understand fiscal and regulatory situations and make informed decisions.

We can avoid plane crashes by flying less… and really, in South Dakota, in the age of Zoom, no state official needs to fly anywhere. But almost every state employee, as well as lots of South Dakota residents, use computers for essential functions every day. We can’t avoid computer crashes by not flying our computers; we must update all of our state systems with reliable, up-to-date technology. Skip the plane purchase: kill HB 1282, and transfer Kristi’s five-million-dollar plane pitch to boost the database brittle fund up to $15 million… and maybe buy the programmers some crunchy snacks to fuel their furious coding!