Profiles in Government: A Closer Look at the Florida Department of Management Services

Considered the business arm of Florida’s government, the Department of Management Services (DMS) supports state agencies and state employees with workforce and business-related functions.

Here is more information about the agency, including who leads it, how many staff the department employs and what the department does as a whole.

FAST FACTS

Budget: $934.6 million total, with an estimated $35.4 million IT budget for FY2024, according to the Center for Digital Government.*

Leadership: Rich Evans is the agency’s CIO. DMS also includes the Florida Digital Service, which houses the state CIO position. The state CIO role is currently vacant.

Staff: According to SB 2500, the Florida Senate’s General Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2023-2024, the agency has 1,036 employees.

MORE ABOUT THE AGENCY:

According to the agency’s website, “The Department of Management Services was created in 1993 after the Departments of Administration and General Services merged” and “was formed to improve services and reduce administrative overhead.”

Today, DMS is split into two major service areas: business and workforce operations.

Under business operations are state purchasing, real estate development and management, telecommunications, fleet and federal surplus property and private prison monitoring.

Workforce operations, on the other hand, encompasses human resource management, people first, which oversees oversight and contractual compliance for the state’s secure, web-based human resource information system services, state group insurance and retirement.

DMS was allocated the following funding for IT in the state’s FY2024 budget:

• $40 million for local government cybersecurity grants 
• $10 million for enterprise cybersecurity resiliency
• $6 million for the Statewide Law Enforcement Radio System (SLERS) tower reconstruction, relocation and repair
• $6 million for SLERS radio replacement
• $5 million to provide an assessment of Florida’s Health Care Connections (FX) Project Assessment, which is a multiyear transformation to enhance the provider and recipient experience, improve access to health-care data and enhance data integration between state agencies
• $2.2 million for FirstNet subscriptions, a nationwide public-safety broadband network for first responders

*The Center for Digital Government, a division of Industry Insider — Florida’s parent company e.Republic, is a national research and advisory institute focused on technology policy and best practices in state and local government.