Selwyn Hollins, who has been acting director of the department for about seven months, had his status made permanent last Tuesday by county officials, said Neal Mok, a spokesperson for ISD. Hollins succeeds the former ISD director, Scott Minnix, who has gone into the private sector and teaching and is president and chief executive of the SDM Group.
In addition to overseeing information technology for the county, ISD’s portfolio includes facilities management, environmental matters, administrative and purchasing functions, and contracting.
What changes should citizens and vendors expect?
“Selwyn is thinking innovatively and he’s trying to do more to provide technology, equipment and information directly to the community,” Mok said. “That’s something that’s new that the department is doing. We usually have taken more of a behind-the-scenes role.”
Hollins is a veteran of government service in the Los Angeles area. He began his career with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, then moved to L.A. city government, serving in various increasingly responsible roles in the city’s transportation and personnel departments. Hollins also served in Los Angeles World Airports, which governs Los Angeles and Van Nuys international airports, before joining ISD in August 2017 as general manager of Administration and Finance Services. Hollins was named chief deputy director of that department in November, and subsequently served as acting director until his appointment last week.
Dave Wesolik, general manager of IT Services for ISD, is one of five departmental GMs serving under Hollins.
Hollins has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cal State Long Beach and a master’s degree from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications.
Under Hollins’ management, ISD:
- Manages the county’s utilities (water/power/gas) billing for an annual budget of over $197 million.
- Expends over $1.5 billion as the county’s purchasing agent.
- Manages $400 million in annual contracts for services provided to ISD on behalf of customer departments.
- Supports more than 100,000 county telephone lines.
- Operates one of the largest governmental data centers west of the Rockies.
- Processes millions of daily transactions for over 40,000 personal computers.
- Provides Internet access to over 46,000 internal users daily.
- Stores over 32.6 million digital documents and loads 10,000 new documents daily.
- Processes more than 28,000 payments to vendors and contractors yearly.
- Runs the county’s bimonthly payroll, including paying 105,000 employees, creating about 2.4 million paystubs totaling $8.64 billion annually.
