The state Department of Accounting and General Services has awarded a contract to overhaul the state’s decades-old financial data system.
In March, DAGS published a request for proposals for bidders to develop a replacement for the current Financial Accounting and Management Information System (FAMIS), which is 55 years old.
On Monday, DAGS Director and Acting Lt. Gov. Keith Regan told Aloha State Daily that, as of last week, DAGS has awarded that contract, totaling $63.7 million, to Virginia-based management firm Guidehouse.
“Our … financial management system is written in a language that’s not even taught in college anymore,” Regan said. “It’s written in COBOL. It’s extremely ancient architecture, and it’s hard to find people that can even program in COBOL anymore these days, and if you can they’re very expensive.”
Regan said practically every state department needs to interact with FAMIS in some capacity. But because of the system’s age, departments have needed to develop additional subsystems in order to properly access the system at all.
“We identified 242 systems that are secondary and tertiary systems that departments have created over the years,” Regan said. “Now imagine the money and the effort that’s going into that.”
Regan said only 53 of those 242 subsystems will be retained amid the system upgrade.
“We are going to not only be changing the technology, the actual software, … but also will be changing the way that we do business within the state of Hawai‘i,” Regan continued.
He explained that the state’s accounting system was codified in law more than a century ago, and that dismantling and replacing FAMIS will help expose superfluous rules that lost their relevance decades ago.
“There’s little snippets that are buried somewhere right within a workflow,” Regan said. “Some of these workflows involve 40 or 50 processes …. Maybe we don’t need to do this anymore. Maybe it was okay in 1925 but we don’t need to do it today in 2026.”
This is DAGS’ third attempt at overhauling FAMIS, Regan said. The previous two were abandoned for being too “technically led,” he said; this attempt will be driven more by how users engage with the system.
Regan said he believes the new core systems can come online in two to three years, while other modules of the system will be completed within five or six years.
Once the project is completed, essential and historical data from FAMIS will be archived, Regan said. But the 55-year-old system itself will be, effectively, destroyed.
Regan said DAGS is planning to have a “retirement party” for FAMIS once its shutdown day arrives.
“The system itself, which is on a mainframe in the cloud, will be turned off, and it’ll be a sad day,” Regan said. “Or a happy day, for many of us.”
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