Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: We are live. Great. I think you said to Senate, so I'll make the order.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Welcome, everybody, to House Energy and Digital Infrastructure. This was intended to be a joint hearing, but our Senate colleagues are delayed. So we are forging ahead. We are going to be hearing today from the Agency of Digital Services about their 2026 annual report, their enterprise project management office dashboard, and, any relevant FY 'twenty seven budget requests. So we'll quickly introduce ourselves, and then we'll, turn it over to our witnesses. So I'm representative Kathleen James from Manchester.

[Unidentified House Committee Member]: All

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: right, and let's see who's joining us in

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the room?

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: Denise Reddick Hughes, Adia. Great. Adia's welcome, Adia's Super.

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: David Perry, the Christ group. Great.

[Lisa Naughton (IT Consultant, Joint Fiscal Office)]: Lisa Naughton, IT consultant with JFO.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Super. All right. I think that is the witness chair. Thank you for being here. Great. What order do you guys want to go in? I know we've our main goal was to follow-up on the work that we passed in our bill last year about the annual report in the EPO dashboard. And then I know you also have a budget request that we want

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: to make sure we understand. So we did a u slide synopsis of the annual report because there were a lot of pages in there. Think it reached well over 200 and those are both published on the agency's website. I believe that legislature has also posted on your reports page as well, so those are all available there. When I say bold, I think that we've separated out that well on our site, but we provided as a single report to the legislature.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great, we'll have to find that on there. It didn't make its way to our committee yet, so we'll have to find it and get it posted on our website as well.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Perfect, John Kelly is sending it to both the House and Senate committees that'll be here in the joint meeting. Okay, great. It's already sent, so we can get your inboxes.

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: All right, thank you. So

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: we can gloss over some of these, but this is a good opportunity to kind of go through what have we done in the last year, and we can just jump right in and then we can spend a little bit of time on the project documentation as well as the finance side. So we have, when I joined the state three years ago, we've been focused on what is it that EDS does, how do we make it predictable, transparent, less complex, understandable, and we've focused on three, four core areas here, which is user experience. Ultimately, at the end it's Board of Remotors specifically. We also find that the user experience ends up being probably the partner and state government agency side, so the users within the agencies that went to run state services using technology, and making sure that we've got that consistent user experience all the way around. I think that we've made some inroads there. We have a lot of work to do, but looking at the use of technology to be able to create that single interface, single front door, so that Vermonters can conduct the work that they need to do, either receiving services from the state or providing services to the state in a seamless way. Standards is ensuring that we're using the same frameworks across the technology stack, whether it's something that is a net new single solution for one department or whether or not it's a core platform. Predictability is really around knowing what it is that we are spending our money on, what we are buying, what it's going towards, and why we're doing it. And then the reducing complexity ties into all of that, but it's also around reducing the technical debt, the security risk, the business risk associated with that technical debt. So being able to start looking at economies of scale and the overall cost of IT and whether or not we can reduce the per user cost of IT by sharing resources or making things available that are already in existence. So we've done this over the last, we've got the three year timeline that goes to a good visual on how are we doing this. So over the past year, we focused on our restructuring of our leadership team. So you've noticed that Stacy introduced herself as the Chief Program Officer. She is focused on strategic programs. We have realigned business architecture, enterprise architecture, and project management under Stacy's organization so that we keep greater alignment at the conception into execution stage of the work that we're doing so that we've got a place for that to be handed off to young line. We've also moved our focus directors under core portfolios. So our field services are no longer supported as a dedicated to department in one area, given that we're serving all the same Vermonters, we're looking at it from a technology portfolio perspective, so that we know where things are connected, who has the access. We take that concept of least privileged access, which is a security term, and we can now apply them across multiple systems so that if something goes down and it happens to be coming from, like an example, DMV that also connects to public safety, that may also connect to judiciary, and in the old model that would have hit four teams, in the new model that hits one team plus one branch, so we are able to have some shared responsibility and accountability right from within the structure of the agency. Service creation is another one, you'll find that in the core enterprise services, we've been talking a lot about core enterprise services and we're going to over the next year focus really deeply around that in the field space, which is what was the embedded teams hired. It is now portfolio aligned, so what are the services that we're providing? What are the platforms that we have operating and running? And now we can really put a cost to that with some measures associated with it too, which is capacity, performance, and quality of those services. So when you're making decisions around whether or not you want to fund something, being able to have some measures to show that we have the right staff, over staff, under staff, if we're performing at a decent metric today or if there needs to be removed from that. Then the last one is a service based budgeting. So we have come in here and the budgeting model has been very complex and I've heard every time I come to testimony, especially when we're talking around the cost of IT, that there's always a comment around why is this so complicated, it doesn't have to. Looking at it as a service based cost modeling, it includes the cost of people and the resources, which is where you can get that capacity metric from, but it also includes the cost of the technology. In the old model, what we were doing was budgeting for a SKU and a product, but we were forgetting that there were a lot of resources and there were a lot of adjacent technologies tied to that, and then in being able to recover for the cost of that, when you go back an agency, there is an opportunity for dispute when you don't want to pay for a SKU or you didn't ask for that resource, but we knew that it was needed in order to be able to deliver the service. So going under a service model, it holds the agency of digital services a lot more accountable to delivering quality service. And it opens the door for the consuming agencies to be able to understand how we're delivering on that service and not just one biopic piece of that environment. Secretary

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Riley, here's just a quick break to introduce our senate colleagues. I know you guys were on the floor, felt like we should go ahead, but this is the first slide. So Oh, okay. Yeah. Alright. So if you wanna introduce yourselves, yeah,

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: I'm the record, chair of institutions, Wendy Harrison. I represent the Windham District, and we're going to have four of us here. Great. So when you do come to our committee, we'll just repeat, what you have said.

[Senator Benson (Orange District)]: Yeah, Tom, John Benson. I represent the Orange District.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Thanks, Senator Benson. Okay.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: This slide hasn't been updated, which really goes to show that we've been consistent in our messaging when I issued this in '24. This is our five year plan. When we have a dramatic change or when we achieve the breakthrough indicators, we'll make sure that that's noted in there, but this is part of the requirements on our reporting. The report is highlighting some of the successes so that any of the readers can take away what is it that you did over the last year and did you do it well. So this highlights a couple of areas where we focused around operational improvement, resource efficiency, and overall supportability of the services that we deliver. So on our enterprise application space, we focused around being able to report accurately on uptime. We did use some AI technology in order to rationalize some of the legacy technology that had been sitting outside of the cloud and hosted data center and moved it into the standard data centers that we have, which allowed for a much quicker response time. It took legacy apps and gave them a little bit extra life as well and allows us a greater up time than we could if a server was sitting in a closet somewhere. The service desk is really tracking the metrics around the supportability of the 11,000 employees that we work with and with the efforts around return to office. The last thing that we wanted was for folks not to be able to connect and do their job when they were sitting in their seats. So this team worked really closely on that work as well as getting everybody's machine on a current version of the operating system, which has improved our ticket volume, but also our revolution time on those tickets. I think that both of the committees know that we have a network modernization project working as a precursor to some of the site connectivity and some of the deployment of those major systems within that network modernization. We went ahead and touched all of the state office buildings under our Wireless First initiative to make sure that everybody had WiFi connectivity in a way that was easily accessible for them. This was an effort that we took on starting in 2023 after their first year of floods, and that was able to be completed, which also improved their access to the network. So we are tracking a 99.9% uptime on that.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Are you doing questions?

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah, we didn't talk about, we

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: usually do this ago.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Okay, so do you consider the correctional facilities to be offices because they've had issues with?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: So they do not have Wi Fi today as part of their core service. It is something that we have been working with them on, but there are quite a few items that we would have to take into consideration because they don't follow the typical model of a state office building. So right now they have wired connections and we have worked at improving some of those wired connections as well. There are other Wi Fi services working within those facilities, which is the inmate network. They have their own network with their own devices as well. And so our networking team is working with those providers and corrections on that.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Great. So we'll talk more about that when you come to our community.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Corn price services, I know that you've talked with us quite a bit on as well, and as we really dig into both the budget going into 'twenty seven and the reporting around the performance of core enterprise services is hopefully going to become expected and predictable so that it's not misunderstood by any means. But I will tell you this is probably one of those areas where our partners in state government will share that they didn't realize that this was the cost of the IT that they were consuming. And that is the feedback that we've received as well, but we're working closely with all of the business offices on that. And then on the field side, that kind of speaks for itself. It just highlights a couple of successes. We've talked a lot about security in both of your committees, as well as in JITOC. One of the things that's important to highlight too when we look at the work that security is doing, These are not numbers that we would have been able to pull five years ago, but we put a lot of focus and time on being very focused and intentional about security. So we are monitoring over three fifty billion secondurity events. So security events is anything happening on the network across the course of a year. So this transactions, it's people, it's logins, it's access, it's problems, it's issues. And so we've been able to leverage AI through the platforms that we have in place. And you can see that based on the numbers, the three thousand plus work days that we have saved through being able to be very focused around the investments that we've made. We've also not asked for additional staff. So this team has stayed the same size for years and they've been able to do this. I think that we are at peak capacity, though, for us, they're 18 today.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah, Reverend Sibilia.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sorry, Secretary Rutland, I'm trying to call this up. Do you have a date on here? So, the response time reduction from thirty seven point three days to three point five days. What is that from when to when?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: This was from the 2024 to 2025, so early twenty twenty four, the CISO who joined the stage on Toni was tracking that our tickets were open for thirty seven days. This is any type of ask that comes through the managing and so their resolution time is 3.5. So this could be something an alert that is I think this is spam or I don't have the right the virus updates on my system, this is any particular thing with help coming in.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So if we were to go back to last year's report, would we have seen, would we see that thirty seven point three day response I

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: don't think we were tracking that. Okay. So we're tracking this as a new metric as part of those performance measures that I was talking about.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay, and what do you attribute that? Did you say AI?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: The reduction?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Attribute it to focus on performance, focus on criticality of need, and a highly skilled system and team.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So change of staff. Okay, sorry. Sometimes I need a little more plainly spoken.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: There's a lot more that goes into Yeah, the

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: thank you, Madam Chair.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: So we do talk about data in AI a lot. This is an area that we are pretty proud of at ADS. We work closely with other states. We were the first state to have director of AI and we have grown that intentionally around good use, but also the intentional use of AI so that we're tracking everything and you'll see that in the report as well. We did go ahead and launch a chat BT as chat GT was coming out. We needed to be very cautious and careful about misinformation or exposing information that shouldn't have been because I think we've had a couple of, it's been a couple of private sector companies and some public backlash by putting protected code data into these commercially globally available systems. And so ChatBet was a internal, more secure system for the state to use, and it is growing by the months. So we now have over 700 employees actively using it on a weekly basis, about 15% of the workforce, which is one of It's actually pretty impressive when we look at the whole workforce using a single platform like this. 15% is a bigger number for us. So we've reduced that cost of the service down to about a dollar.

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: Can I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: ask a

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: quick question? Yeah.

[Unidentified House Committee Member]: ChatVT, what are state employees using it for?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: They're using it for sometimes email responses. They will say I need to respond to somebody. They'll use it for editing a document, they will use it for interpretation, but everything requires the user to make intentional prompts to it and decipher the information. And so one of the recommendations that we make in that code of ethics is that if you're using AI, disclose it, you're using AI, but there's gotta be a human language.

[Unidentified House Committee Member]: And where do its brains come from? Where do its brains come from?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: It's hosted as part of the OpenAI system under Azure.

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: Thank you. It is

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: a pretty low cost solution. We're looking at I think it's costing the state about $300 a month for that many users. We're trying to be economical about it.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Great.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: BCGI, I think that I would expect that everybody in this room has heard a lot about maps. And so eCGI I feel like they may be having their fifteen minutes of being here but they have done some incredible work on the data that they ingest under their system and they've been doing this for years and years It just so happens to be really relevant right now in the individual age, where now as you're looking at all of the work that the state is doing to be able to visualize it in a way that they have presented on their maps has been really valuable across every one of the agencies, legislature, and the Vermont public. And so they have increased now their direct hits to about a billion map requests, which is more than they've ever had before. And so you can see the statistics up there. We have these screenshots and some more data and some more narrative within the annual report to show, but this is the only division or only team, they're under the data in the area division within ADS that is public facing. So they work really closely with municipalities, with boards and commissions and with agencies, but the Vermont public overall.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: No, they're great, they're wonderful, and they're really responsive, and that's separate from the ANR

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: data, right? Correct. They do a lot of the work for ANR though. So that is part of where, when we start looking at core enterprise services, having eCGI be considered a core service that everybody uses allows, although ANR may be inputting the data, AOT may wanna use that data, and so if it's shared access and shared resources, then it lowers the individual cost of those services. I'm not going get into the systems inventory, but we do have that fully published in the report, which is required. So we've increased our deployed AI systems quite a bit. We almost seem to be doubling it year over year, so we may look to improve how we are providing that inventory so that it still meets the requirements of the detail, but that it's not 25 pages of the report. These are just some examples of what we have pushed out. And I'm going to hand things over to Kate because this is part of our finance data and it gets into some of the budget conversations. I would ask, I'm sure I'd ask several chairs, do you want to do the finance stuff now or jump to the project and then go back to campus?

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: So,

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sibilia, are kind of consolidating this information? Yes. For the purposes of taking up less?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: I'm consolidating this information because it is two fifty plus pages and I want to make sure that we create some highlights to at least cover at a high level the first time that we testified on the report and the budget. Interestingly enough, we did use AI to help generate this, which is in the back of the presentation.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So I wonder if you and I don't know if this is the time, Madam Chair, but I just kind of want to flag I don't kind of want I would like to flag here that we are seeing explosive growth of AI, and I would expect throughout state government. And as we talk about a lot, we have Your job is to run the government. Our job is to provide oversight, make sure you're doing a great job. And how if we are consolidating all of this, how is the legislature able to do their job? So I think that's a very big question, Madam Chairs, but it's one that I think is very important for us to understand. And I don't know if we should have maybe an additional session on this.

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: Well, so looking at the testimony

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: that we're taking today, we're going to annual report, which is a big document, I assume we're summarizing here. I'm sure folks will have follow-up questions in the weeks to come on the annual report, which I haven't read yet. I mean, we just got it. And we did this on purpose. We wanted to bring you in right away. The EFMO dashboard, I think, is going to be really important to look at because that was something that we focused on a lot in the bill we passed last year. And I want to make sure that we

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: talk about the

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: budget because, we anyway have to look at your budget request and write a budget letter, soonish. So why don't we, since we have the center here and maybe we should talk about the UpMode dashboard or keep moving through the annual report, talk about the UpMode dashboard because I know you want to show us some stuff. And then let's just make sure we leave enough time for our budget conversation. Otherwise, we'll have you guys come back in like

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: Does that sound good? So

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: will we come back to that at another session, maybe?

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah, not today.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: That's my question.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: And And this might be a good time for the other two senators to join us. You don't have to, but I just want Okay, all right. So, there are four of us here. Okay.

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: I'll introduce myself again. I'm Stacy Gibson Grantville. I'm the Chief Program Officer for the Agency of Digital Services, and one of my areas of responsibility is the Enterprise Project Management Office and how we report information to legislature. So what you see here is just a summary of changes we've made in both our annual report and on our dashboard to try to make things a little easier for people to understand and consume information. We've updated our project status categories. So they're a little less verbose and easier to understand as far as like what is the color green mean? And what is the color yellow mean? And what is color red mean? So essentially green means things are good, yellow means there's risks that we're keeping an eye on and trying to take courses of action to remediate and red are things that our team may not be able to solve for and we need to bring in other members of state leadership to help us either more resources or some kind of negotiation with a vendor or more funding. So that's essentially at a high level, how you define a status and risk on projects. And we have changed our external dashboard page to reflect these definitions. Little easier for a Vermonter citizen, if they're interested to understand what it is the data itself. So currently, one thing I will just say, our annual report is a snapshot in time. So the data represents a specific day in December when we pull down all the information and then takes about a week to create the report. And now it's been a few weeks since then. So things are gonna change on the dashboard compared to what's in the annual report. So I just want to remind people that new projects come in, other projects might close, things like that happen. And so the data's being refreshed on the dashboard every week, or is the annual report done once a year?

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Right, thanks for clarifying that because I'm on the dashboard right now and it's already shifting so clearly it's dynamic.

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: So as of the time of the report, we had 48 active projects that will be managed by the project management office. 68% of them were meeting all of the expectations and on track. 25% had risks that were being proactively addressed. And there were 7% that required leadership intervention, which I think was like four or five individual projects

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: that led to the last percent. And those are just a metrics side of it. You're not saying it like that is one of the lowest risk ratings projects that you would see in a

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: state government space. It's quite impressive.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Thank you. So, do you weight the projects? Like, if one project is 5,000,000 and another one is 500,000, you probably don't need 500,000. But do you weight the bigger projects?

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: No, the risks are defined at the project level. So it doesn't define It's not weighted as far as like magnitude of cost or So anything like you can have a project that's for example, the DMV core modernization project, which closed in 2025, was a green status throughout its pretty much its entire existence. It might have dipped into the yellow for a little bit when they ran into some complexities around shared data and information with public safety. But for the most part, was green and that was one of the most expensive projects on our dashboard compared to a CRM project that might be really struggling because of the type of business process that we're trying to implement, and has some significant risks and the costs are much lower. Like you could have the DMV port project at 50 plus million and another project at 8,000,000 and that $8,000,000 project is in the 7% risk category. So, another new thing we did this year. So, last year, you'll remember in the annual report, we included a chart for budget variance, which basically just represents the difference between projected and actual expenditures. This year, we also were able to add scheduled variants, which measures the difference between planned and actual progress. So whether or not a project is moving ahead of schedule on track or behind schedule. So that's a new feature that you'll see in the annual report. Each project has one of each of those charts. So you'll see a schedule and a budget variance for every project in the annual report. And what this offers us is an ability to kind of look forward a little bit and see how projects are trending. Because if you can look back and see how they've been trending, that kind of gives you an indication of we're running into an area where we might want to spend a little time understanding what's causing, you know, a schedule to kind of go off track a little bit. And then I think we have one more. So these are the projects we completed in 2025. We closed 20 projects in the last year, which is significant. And some really important ones like the AOT DMV core side of replacement that completed in December. I like to call that one of our bigger success stories just because of the fact that it really gives some improved experience for the Vermonter coming in and getting their licenses renewed or their registrations renewed. And then the AOT Construction Management System is another big one that closed. There are a few there in the AHS space. Some internal ones like the Windows 11 upgrade. I won't go through the whole list, but just to say that it's really great to see so many different agencies seeing some success in their project delivery, in closing out some of these projects successfully, many of which are on time within budget and within scope. And then one more, JK.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: I would say before you get into the dashboard, one important thing to note that you didn't highlight at the level that we did in your report is that Stacy along with some key members of her team worked with other agency leaders and other elected offices to come up with almost a pre project, they're calling it intake, but it's a business architecture, I would say a business plan to come up with pre projects so that it sets projects up for better success, but as we're starting to look at these metrics, they can't be considered once you already have a project in its contract signature execution stage, it really needs to be set up for success early in that process. And so the intake we've now taken fifteen, sixteen, 20 projects through this or 20 inception based projects through this, which also brings the business agencies to the level of understanding around whether or not they have all the right information to make it successful. So that that's not something that is an afterthought after a project's already started and we don't miss the mark on projects. So that is one of the things that came out of 2025 that has been behind the scenes, but very, very valuable to the overall project success across every agency.

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah, you'll see it in the ADS annual report. There's a page basically about the changes to my office, which expanded basically the project management office in the three business units. So, we brought the enterprise architecture team over from the Chief Technology Officer into the program office. And then we created a new unit called the Business Transformation Office. And what's really exciting about the Business Transformation Office as the secretary was just explaining is one, we bring together members of the business partner agencies, our agency, including members of core field services to sit down at the time that the business comes to us and says, hey, I have a need, I need something built, or I need help solving for something. I have a new policy, and I don't have a system for it, and I need to be able to track data or whatever, or build a workflow around it. So, they'll fill out a very simple form online that will come into our office. We then have right out of the gate, a meeting with them and our team to sit down and really get an understanding of what it is exactly they're trying to accomplish. Justin Kenny from the Chief Performance Office is also part of this board. And alongside of him, we work with them on defining their outcomes. What is the outcome that you're looking to achieve? How can we work together to ensure that whatever solution we bring forward is actually going to help you achieve those outcomes? And so what we've done is we've flipped the narrative so that we're not coming to you and saying, I have a technology solution for you. We're waiting for them to come to us, get a better understanding of what their needs are, and then working together with them alongside of us to get finding what our platform is. And it can go in one of three directions. It can go down the direction of a business process improvement effort. They don't need any technology. They may have all the tools that they need. They just need members of my team, business analysts, business architects, enterprise architects, to help them define their business process or fix and adjust their business process to meet their new needs. Or we might determine that they do need some technology and we already have something internal, which means we don't have to go through procurement. We can look at our field and core services team to come in and sit down with them. It might be a new SharePoint site, it might be an automated workflow on an existing SharePoint site, it could be anything. But then working with them to understand, will this work for you? And then that goes into an operations phase.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: If we have time, could you quickly, on the dashboard, I don't know if John can pull it up, but we can see it well enough. Can you just remind us which columns are new and which columns changed? Yeah, from last year? Yeah, from last year.

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: So the changes we made to the dashboard last year was we put in the project start date, which is that very old IT ABC form initial date that we received request. This process I was just describing to you is going to change that a little bit. But that project start date is the very first time anybody's come to us with a request and we start filling in all of the information on the agency form. The implementation start date was there before, but we've redefined it last year to be the date that we've signed a contract with a system implementation vendor and started what we call the execution phase. So from project start date to implementation start date is all of the planning work that I was just describing where you're defining outcomes, you're writing an RFP, and you're going through the procurement process. It's not until you get to implementation start that you're actually sitting down with a vendor and building something. Then we had initial, I believe it says initial completion date and estimated completion date. Same thing, in the early stages of a project using an ITDC form. When you have that project start date, you have an initial completion date, which is like our best guess based on the limited information we have is that it's going to take us a year to do this. And then so often what happens is you go through an RFP process, you get into a contract negotiation with sound ridiculous, but can sometimes those contract negotiations alone can take two to three years just to get through because of all the back and forth of legal counsels and red lines and that type of thing. So, the estimated completion date is based on the contract negotiation. So, both your implementation start date and the estimated completion date, the fourth column, are more based on the reality of a contract you've negotiated with a vendor that gives you a better sense because in a contract you have a term, start date and end date. So you're a little more confident on those dates at that point. And I think the rest of it, I can't really read it either from here. I think there's also- Current cost versus estimated. Yeah, same thing. So in the old process with the ITVC form, again, we do a pretty rough estimate based on again, limited information, no contract with the vendor yet, like we think this is how much it's gonna cost. And usually those early estimates are based on resourcing because we don't necessarily know what we're procuring yet. Or if we think we know, we can kind of guess based on another project's implementation costs or whatever the industry is quoted for costs at the time. You might have done a request for quote or an RFI also to inform some of that. But again, you're not going to get into the real initial estimated costs or the current estimated costs until after a contract's been negotiated and you know how much that system implementers gonna charge you. The other thing about the contract piece is not only do they tell you what they're gonna charge you, how much this thing's gonna cost when we build it, but you have a timeline because the contract has that term, which gives us more information to estimate resource costs. So if I know based on the contract, the system implementers telling me it's going to take eighteen months to deliver this product, and it's going to cost me $3,000,000 then I can say, all right, eighteen months, I need a project manager, I need a business analyst, I need a security analyst, I need an enterprise architect, whatever else you have, like IT operations support, IT manager, for example, that's in the current space and needs to help with whatever the new thing is, you can then better estimate those costs. And so that's what's baked into the current implementation cost estimate. Are

[Unidentified House Committee Member]: the technology and your processes evolving too fast for the past history data you have about how long projects took and how much they cost to be useful guides to current?

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah, I would say technology is moving fast. Inflation is a thing. A technology you would have procured five years ago is gonna cost you probably double this year just because of the cost of everything today, right? Like the technology solution providers are not looking to make things more cost effective, they're looking to make more money off the products that they're selling. So absolutely, I think the look back is not as helpful as it once was. There was a time when you could look back two years and feel pretty confident that your costs are going to be within the ballpark. And I would say now that that's changed drastically.

[Unidentified House Committee Member]: Is that same true for timelines?

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: I would say the speed to delivery in some cases may be increasing. So you could see shorter timelines than what you would have seen before. Obviously, we're not building big, large monolithic mainframe systems anymore. Everything's a product, cloud based software as a service, for example, like when you're buying a software as a service, you're likely not building a net new thing, you're using a service that they already provide elsewhere, and just configuring it to meet your business needs. That's a lot quicker turnaround time than building something from a ground up. It's like, it's similar to like buying a house, and I don't mean this to be overly simplistic, but it's how my brain sometimes rationalizes things. If I'm looking to just expand my household, I'm not necessarily going to look for a whole brand new foundation because I've already got a foundation. I just need to add another column to it perhaps or another room to it. I may not even need to adjust the foundation. I could just add another level to the building. Whereas, if you're looking to buy a brand new house with a whole new footprint, you're going spend more on that, right? Because you're building everything. So, the software as a service can give you that little piece that I just want to expand versus, you know, this big monolithic systems, a lot of people aren't procuring this anymore.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: I think that what we're all saying too, when I joined the state three years ago this week,

[Unidentified House Committee Member]: Happy anniversary!

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: 120 something projects, so we're less than half that today. So as far as the volume of activity, we've seen a little bit of a downtrend in that volume, but these are anecdotal trends. The information that you're seeing in the data that Stacy's team is collecting is done really manually. So that asset trend analysis that we would want to look at to see costs over time, we don't have the resources today to do that. These are not IT investments under ADS supportability,

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: these are IT investments for specific services where we are replacing systems or we're adding new for something that never existed before. Yeah, every data element you see on this dashboard has a manual intervention behind it. So the project management tools that we have require a project manager to key the data in. There is no automation. It is all very manual. And sometimes they have to use more than one tool to do the jobs. So, they'll use a tool that we use to collect the data that helps us to create

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: the reports and the dashboard.

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: But then they may use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to actually share status reports to the business user, right? Because it has a better feel, format things better. The other drawback to the tool that we have today, with your permission, like it's extremely labor intensive to create this dashboard. It takes two and a half hours of a data analyst time to run the job that updates the dashboard from our project management tool. And without getting Yeah, it's very manual intensive. It does take a lot of time. I just want to say that I'm extremely proud of my team because of the amount of work that they do put into it. And we try very hard to provide as much transparency and visibility as we can in the data that we do collect. But we do have to put a lot of thought into it. Making adjustments to the dashboard isn't like just adding a column. There's a lot of work that has to go on behind the scenes to make it work. How

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: often are you running this dashboard? Every week.

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: So, the PMs have to have all their data in by 06:00 on Friday evenings, and the dashboard updates Monday morning.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: So, I'm very interested in procurement. And in the dashboard, it has, lines for, what it's costing to get to project, the, implementation. But then I don't see information on the ongoing cost to the state of the service. And I'd like to talk about this more in our committee when you're there. But I would suspect that there are trade offs that you can make, like higher implementation, maybe lower cost. Because typically in the state, we would have something for years and probably longer than we would want it, right? I mean, our systems, we're not super fast at getting new systems. So is there an advantage, or can we plan in a way that the state has lower ongoing costs because we know that those will probably be longer term than we expect? I mean, we have systems that are 20 years old, 30 years old, right?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: So 60 years old.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Okay, there you go. So, I just don't want to assume that we're going to have five year

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: is a big update. Conversation, and really what we're talking about is system life cycle or service life cycle. So the work that we've done in getting core enterprise services launched, moving our staff under a portfolio based model sets the stage for what we just described. Because if you look at the stages of a life cycle, we're talking about our intake, project management, execution and go live, getting up to that point is what you are seeing us tracking. Once we get to go live, where's the tracking from there? Is it just something that you hand off to the business or is it something that we now look at as a field service that has a service based cost to it for what we call it M and L, so maintenance and operations. The maintenance and operations isn't just the cost of buying a SKU for a software product, it's the total service cost of how many people does it take, is it performing, does it have uptime, are we having problems, is it delivering the service that the agency needs it to do, Is it meeting the public's need? Is it meeting your need? And so that's the stage that we're getting into starting in '27 by really putting some serious focus on the field services side. When we were created, April will be nine years, the embedded field model that we absorbed when EDS was created never changed. Meaning that more than 50% of the departments across state government do not have field resources. So moving under a portfolio model opens the opportunity for them to have access to those field services so that we're not paying a ton of money to have our partner or a non state resource do something that we're already doing for another department over here. We are very much looking at this under a microscope for technology services that we provide.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Good, and yeah, so I'll leave it there for now, but that's a

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: good conversation. It's a

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: big conversation. Okay. And it's taking time. Change is hard for some people and others. They love it. So I think that's the end of the FOBs. Is there any specific other project instructions?

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: I don't even see a human services. I see that as a massive amount of work to be done in there. Will all those different modules that are in there gonna be

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: able to talk to one another?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: That's part of the work that we're doing on that business transformation as well as enterprise architecture being under Stacy's division so that we do need to pay a petition where we can. Sometimes it's federally mandated so if the funding is coming from a particular federal source, we do have to make sure that we create containerization around that so that the cost of the service is independent of others. But all of those projects have a level of integration planning around them.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So we can ask about specific projects?

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah, I mean It's a

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: very simple question. So we have to

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: be on the floor at three. How long should we save for your budget presentation and or should we reschedule it?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Think we can finish

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: this. I'm good. Okay. There's questions.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Great. So this is just about the report. So I'm looking at the project inventory. And, I know that we have a hearing scheduled on the child welfare information system. So I don't want to get deep into that. My question is when I'm looking at the budget risk schedule scope, why are there no red marks there?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: For CCWIS? Yes. Because it is still in contract negotiation stage, so it hasn't started. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: A simple question, too, which I don't think you've addressed. Some of these have blanks the project inventory, and one of them in particular that I was looking at was the integrated eligibility that was eligibility and enrollment.

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: Just like cc was it is in procurement, so we don't have all the data to support the dashboard. A good indicator is that if there is no pro

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: if there is no implementation start date, it means it hasn't started. So there's gonna be other flags in there. If there's an implementation start date and you're still seeing flags, then we could either have a data We could have a data on the It didn't come over.

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: Well

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: It's a pretty complex query, so that is always possible.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: So that's another one I would say is open RMP stage.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Well, I mean, that's I e and e has Yes. Been going on for, I don't know, a decade. There's a

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: noticing project that is active, and I believe that is looked at separately, and that's a matter of work there. Okay.

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: Yeah, just one other follow-up. You are looking at systems that have already been created that just need minor or modification. Some of them, yes. We don't have to build everything from scratch.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: No, correct. We would like to not have to build everything from scratch, yeah. And that's probably why you're seeing 52 projects and not 120, is that being able to maximize the investments that the state has already made in some of these bigger systems. We're having conversations right now with tax, DMV, and labor as we start looking at they are all engaged with the same technology provider for their massive business systems and there is an opportunity for us to create a unified support model, so that we are not recreating individual independent support, sorry, for each one of them.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: All

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: right, budget. I

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: know we're asking folks to think a little bit differently and it is uncomfortable for some people, but when we look at the funding source and the cost of our monitors, it's really important that we can reduce reduce overall cost if we don't look independently at everything and we start looking more collectively at things.

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: Again, the record, Case Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer of CDC Services. So you may recall from past years as we spoke to the committee about our recovery structure under our budget, and it was really complex. There was demand to it, there was allocation to it, there was time sheet, And that's what you're seeing on the left side. What we have done is work really collaboratively with finance and management to simplify this and to bring some consistency and predictability to our budgeting process, as well as our budgeting outlook for the future. What we've been able to do is define this to three areas for enterprise services, agency solutions, and bespoke. And I've said bespoke before. So as a reminder, bespoke is really those services or products that are unique to a customer agency. The agency solutions are enterprise solutions that we offer to customers across the enterprise, or they're for professional services of our staff. Project management is one of those, enterprise architects, system administration. Core enterprise services is the exciting part, and that are the services that all of the enterprise consumes one way or another. Things like network connectivity, security, cybersecurity the help desk, GIS, we talked about that earlier. Business office. Business office, IT procurements, services that are necessary to provide a uniform IT solution across the enterprise. And for agency digital services being an internal service agency, one of

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: the things that has been a little troubling for me is that we can sit down and have a conversation about budget, but it's very challenging to decouple budget from expenditure to recovery and that adds to the confusion if we don't look at the full transaction life cycle, I say use the word life cycle again, the full transaction, it's an entirety. So you've got a budget, you're going to spend the money, but then as an internal service agency, we're going to have to charge people. And so the reason why this looks so complex is it's the easiest way to describe that out of the five categories that you see in budget requests prior to this year, the color that circled correlates to the color over the new model, which is core enterprise services were recovered under four different categories, meaning that you never had a single cost being able to be recovered under the same, call it bucket funding source. And that adds to the complexities because how do you fully recover for everything? So bespoke, you can see represented costs under timesheet, SLA and bespoke. And agency solutions, it could be under telephony timesheet, SLA, and sometimes bespoke too. So, we need to make sure that we couple budget, expenditure and recovery in the same space so that you know what it is, you know what's going in and you know what's going out and that we balance a expenditure book at the end of the year and have a zero. And that's what you're going get into a little bit next. Sorry, wanted to explain that so that you know why all those circles were there. This

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: next slide shows you how those three recoveries are broken out, and it's really the funding structure behind those recoveries. In the past, we had a lot of response together. And working with finance and management, we have broken this out. So the green reflects funding of special funds, general funds, and some internal service funds, whether it be financial management fund or the CIT fund, which was our lion's share of recovery in the past. The purple represents those core I'm sorry, not core Agency Solutions. Agency Solutions and the enterprise offering, formerly known as SLA. So those are really the services that the agencies require, but they are unique to them, but they are an enterprise offering. So a

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: good example would be server workload in the cloud. So we're not going to charge DMV for server workloads that are consumed by labor. So labor gets to use or get charged for their own compute, but the existence of that data center being there is the core enterprise service. They just pay for their own compute. So that mitigates that not being able to recover at the individual SKU level. Now we're recovering at the consumed service level. So it's still going to be a net net, but we don't have to charge agencies who are not consuming those at their own scale. Yeah. It's a good way to describe it.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And and and we we changed how that went last year. Right? So that it wasn't we're not AA.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Well, we'd actually like to see some of those drop over time and felt there was not a big PAA. ADS didn't have an APAA request this year. So the $15,000,000 was because if you remember the Pinnacle was recovered a year in arrears, meaning that they could spend the money this year but we don't bill them until next year.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Which is why it showed up in the BAA.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Right, and then they'll say, well, we don't have the money for it, that's why it's in BAA. So we're gonna reduce, you'll start seeing the purple reduce over time as needed, but when it does increase, it'll

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: be intentional and planned. Yes, the purple now truly reflects the consumption by agency or department. I think

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: what you'll notice too is AES has never had a general fund appropriation. So that general fund appropriation is to also mitigate the true cost of core services that the agencies have not been paying for over time. And it is to try to lessen that for them. It is less than a quarter of the total cost of the quarter type services, I think it represents a $9,000,000 number on the

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: budget proposal.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: And then the ADS custom services is what you would have seen as bespoke, So those are IT projects or those unique one time

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: Yeah, ADS customer services are things like the hardware that agencies consume And it can also be professional services related to a system development or system implementation.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: And any project that's not going through the IT Mod Podge, we would have seen represented under this book. Oh,

[Speaker 0]: I'm sorry.

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: The blue there you were just talking about, that seems pretty low to me. How does that compare to previous years?

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: That's a great question. It is lower than in past years. So in the past, we were given spending authority for what we assumed would be needed within the various projects as it related to the IT ABC forms that had been executed. This number represents $5,000,000 to support our hardware costs associated with bespoke. It does not include any of those project costs for vendor support that we bring in for the various projects that the Admiral is managing.

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: So where are those other costs?

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: So the plan is that those other costs will live in other agency and departments' budgets, which they always have lived there. We had spending authority in our internal service funds so that we could pay these vendors and then bill back to customer agencies for those services. The plan and we still need to map out the details of that plan. But the intention is that those vendors will be paid directly by the customer agency.

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: Doesn't that kind of go against the systematic approach to IT across agencies?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It does. Okay.

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: So this isn't necessarily your recommendation, but this is how it's being proposed?

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Or

[David Perry (The Christ Group)]: you don't have Yeah. To answer

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: I understand. Okay. Thank you.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Rep. Sibilia? So did the legislature require you to do that?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: No. So are you assured? Have you checked? Do you know if those costs are embedded in all the other department and agencies' budgets since the budget is now up?

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: I do not have visibility in that, nor do I personally know if that exists in other agency banks.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Okay. So

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: let me make sure that I understand what we're talking about here. So you've got the hardware costs in here. And the piece that is not in here that we're presuming, but don't know if they are included in the agency and department budgets is the

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: fill in the blank.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: The ongoing projects.

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: The vendor loss related to the projects. So when we would need to bring in professional services from a vendor, those costs are not reflected in our budget.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And whose responsibility is it? This is a problem.

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: You might need to read this a problem.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is a problem. So this means we don't really have visibility into the state's IT costs any longer.

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: We do not have ADES.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Well, we don't in the legislature either.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: Oh, yeah. So I think we can write the schedule, follow-up reading, and maybe that could be done here as well.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Go ahead. I'm trying to process this. So, say there's a monthly fee that needs to be paid. Do the departments pay that, the service fee? You're not paying that anymore, right?

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: 27, we will not be paying. So in the past, we

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: would pay for that.

[Kate Wilkham, Chief Financial Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: If there was a vendor cost, whether it be for deliverables that were provided or for some sort of service fee, we would pay that. And then we would bill back our customer agency for those costs. Now they will bill and the understanding is that they will bill the customer agency directly and not come through ADS.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Okay. But you will still be interacting with that company. So presumably, you would know if it didn't get paid, but that's not Well, hopefully, at some point, you would know, but that's a really that's not ideal for you to know when it's in default or something.

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: I think a lot of work has to be done. If we were currently on the replacement ERP system, there would be mechanisms in place to have visibility. I don't I have not been able to see the designated Fulton Vision, so those would require finance management to provide that information to ADS on a regular basis.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Okay, I guess just one, so you could also tell finance what should be happening, I would

[Unidentified Member (House or Senate)]: think, right?

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District; Chair, Senate Institutions Committee)]: Okay,

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: we'll talk more. Okay. So,

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: we have to be on the floor at three and I do want to give members a break. So, I think that if we have one quick question, clearly we need to get you guys in to committee. So, because we didn't finish your budget request, and I think there are probably a lot of questions about the FY27 budget now that we're not going to have time to do. That is not a rush conversation. Yeah. So, why don't we adjourn yeah, do have one quick question?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Just a clarifying question. Yeah. I see we have our JFO consultant here. And I just wonder if this is news to our JFO consultant. And if so, if she can kind of do some translation maybe for us at a future date when you decide to take us

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: out I don't of like rushing conversations in

[Secretary Denise Reilly-Hughes (Agency of Digital Services)]: the second quarter.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: So I'd really rather give Lisa a beat to Understand

[Stacy Gibson Grantville, Chief Program Officer (Agency of Digital Services)]: the impacts.

[Rep. Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Okay. So great. So we have to be on Floor 3. So why don't we adjourn? And our committee assistant will reach out to schedule a budget conversation with you guys. Awesome. Thank you. Great. All right. So we can go offline.