Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Introduce ourselves, please.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Okay, good

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: afternoon. This is still Tuesday, 01/27/2026 and this is the second part of our meeting. This is Senate institutions. We will be going over the Digital Services 2026 Annual Report. We have quite a few people in the room to help us go through that. And we'll just start out with community members introducing themselves. Wendy Harrison, I represent the Windham District and chair of this committee. And I'm Rob Plunkett.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: I have met everyone except me to you, Bennington District, I'm Vice Chair of the Joe Major, Windsor District. Russ Ingalls, Essex District. John Benson, Orange District.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, and then we'll have you introduce yourself as you please and as you testify and you'll recall that this committee now has jurisdiction over IT in the Senate and so we have been getting to know you last year and now we're doing more and look forward to hearing what's going on and looking, determining how we go forward.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Well, for the record, I'm Denise Riley Hughes. I'm the secretary for the Agency of Digital Services and the state chief information officer.

[Kate Slocum]: I am Kate Slocum. I am the chief financial officer for

[Denise Riley Hughes]: the Agency of Digital Services.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: And I'm Stacy Gibson Granfield. I'm the chief program officer for the Agency of Digital Services.

[Kate Slocum]: Great. Thank you for being here.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Thank you. Madam Chair, I know that we had an opportunity to half meet in a joint session. We

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: did. So, let's go from the beginning.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: So, you would like us to cover the annual report and

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yes. Some And, we can take our time with that too. Don't have to go

[Denise Riley Hughes]: too fast. Is there a preference in order of touching on the finance piece or the Will he be about these first?

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: We need to make sure that we hear about the finance piece. That's critical. But the status of the projects is necessary too.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Perfect. Okay. We'll have John Kelly present on the screen. We bring our own IT support. So the annual report this year you will find is a little different than last year. We wanted to make sure that we focused on what did we accomplish over the last year, but also with the statutory change around dashboard and documentation and data regarding projects. That is also inclusive of the annual report that is linked out from the ADS report. And then we also include the finance data from the year prior and a I believe that we keep a snap we do a snapshot. There is some information because we have made some significant change in organizational structure and the finance structure of ADS coming into FY '27, but we made some initial changes through '26 to make it happen. And we can talk a little bit about that. Okay.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Need to get into Zoom.

[Kate Slocum]: We can't get into the Zoom I can't the

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: app. Do you need help? I mean, assistance.

[Kate Slocum]: Is there anything we can do? It's such a frustrating job.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: So why don't we, we'll get started just on the three year strategy, and I think a lot of this will sound like repeat to the committee in regards to what AES has been focusing on. So, when I joined the state three years ago, we really took a look at the maturity of the agency and what our responsibilities are to being able to deliver effective IT services services and solutions to our partners and state government and ultimately to Vermonters. So we focused our initiatives and effort around four major strategic areas. One being user experience, and ultimately, the primary user in that is Vermonters. Secondary user is our users across State Government. And we do have a a third user group, which is our own internal EDS users too, because if we are not operating as a one EDS, then it makes it really challenging for our partners to get the level of service that they are intending for. The other one is standards. So ensuring that we're following aligned standards and framework across the deployment of systems, the configuration, and the architecture of systems as well. But this is IT standards from a technology ecosystem, but then also security standards. I know that our utmost standards are very matured, but we follow a global model for the work that we do there.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: You mind questions as So, we go would standards include level of service kind of standards? Yes. Okay, great.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: The standards also include components of moving from a transactional model to a service model. I think that I'm not there's not one person I've heard from that says, ADS and technology information that we provide is not confusing. So we're trying to demystify it a little by ensuring that those expected standards exist, but then also I'm gonna jump to predictability. The The predictability piece is both in the finance, the budget planning, the cost structure, the service quality, the capacity, and making sure that those data points and those measures are available both to the consumers, but also to share annually with legislature too, so that you can see how well we're doing as you you have the oversight role and requirements. I think that's something that we have really taken into consideration with this model as well, is making sure that we demystify things enough so that it can allow for effective oversight and it can reduce the confusion. And then the last thing is the reducing complexity piece. Going from a department with everybody having their own way of doing IT nine years ago to now being a centralized agency that has the responsibility of all IT operations across state government, burning down the technical debt and ensuring that we are doing things in a way that can have achievable outcomes, that's what that reducing the complexity is. Everybody doesn't get to do their own thing in their own way. We've gotta we've gotta be consistent, and so that keeps things less complex. Any questions or comments? Do we have successful presentation yet? Since we're ready. That's great. It it happened. And I do believe that this was shared too. Yeah.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: It was. It was. I think

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: it would be helpful if

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: you have examples of things like Sure. Three days to do edX or, you know, that kind of

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Uh-huh. Well, we can definitely talk about this. Let me really just cover the other side too so that you know what we've done to date. We've completely changed our leadership structure as well. So we had a very wide but not deep structure. So it was it limited the accountability and responsibility sharing and the consistency in service delivery. So we have realigned the leadership structure, but what we've done is we've also created portfolios. And I think I remember last year, and I know when Jai talked, we talked about the portfolio model that we've aligned our teams into, focused around the technology used by the different agencies and departments that interface and interconnect with each other. So, it's kind of the IT view of state government. So, we have four portfolios that we are aligning both in the project management team, in our business architecture and enterprise architecture teams, also in the business office, they're gonna be undertaking that in FY twenty seven as well, and then our field services. So those are enforcement and regulation, operations and administration, environment and infrastructure, and the last one is life and learning. So when we look at the ecosystem of technology and the user communities within each one of those, they're very likely serving the same people or touching the same asset environments. So a good example would be permitting. So when you look at the concept of permitting, in environment and infrastructure, agriculture, agency of natural resources, and agency of transportation, all touch aspects of permitting. And in the tech space, if we can look at that as part of a centralized ecosystem, then we're making better decisions for everybody, even if a source of funding may initiate in only one of the departments or agencies. So it allows for repeatability of investments, and it also allows for lower cost of IT spend when we start looking at it that way. In the life and learning, these are departments and agencies that typically will touch the state of Vermonter. So we wanna drive a more comprehensive user experience for Vermonter who is in need and trying to get a level of service than under a single portfolio, no matter which department they are supporting and servicing, those field services folks can understand and support the demands of the user and the demands of the service with a broader perspective.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So that'd be like, AHS?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: The departments within AHS, yes. But we did move corrections over to enforcement regulation purely from the sense of the regulatory compliance requirements that they have to maintain and who they are interfacing with across state government. So you think of sieges. They have to maintain what was sieges requirements. They're interfacing with the attorney general's office and the courts. And the state's attorneys and sheriffs. So that allows us to keep them within an ecosystem that they are most interfacing with.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Interesting. And you probably know they're intentionally in AHS, which normally they're not. That function is normally not in that type of area. But the idea is that it's supposed to be corrections, not just incarceration. Correct. So, I mean, there are going to be things that don't fit perfectly in one. Correct.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: But their their user community will have the same level of output support as any of the other portfolios, so it's still about excellent service. But it's about making sure that the data is controlled and restricted in a way that matches, like, agencies, but also shorter route to sharing. Mhmm. So Department of Corrections interfaces and shares regularly with state's attorney's offices or sheriff's offices. And if we start looking at everybody in siloed ecosystems, then we're recreating data sets five times over, increasing the cost of IT spend across the state. And so, this at least keeps that the opportunity for cost gap down. People are still going to want to maintain a level of independence and uniqueness, but it does at least reduce the silos. Sure, sure. And we have had issues with data, not necessarily ADDS issues, but we have

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: had challenges. Yeah. Getting data. Yeah. Between organizations.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: And so, job is the enablement piece, and it's not necessarily our data, but we wanna make sure that it's protected based on how the agencies or departments are expecting it to. A good example, I think, comparison, if you look at the Vermont State Police Barracks, they all have various facilities across the state that they're doing state operations in. The demands that they have in there with, you know, the level of security, the level of controls, the level of restricted WiFi access, very similar to what we would see within correctional facilities, too. We wouldn't have that in a legacy model where everybody's working independently. One other thing to call out too is that when we did the analysis around our field coverage, less than 50% of the departments and agencies have dedicated field staff.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Had what? Dedicated field staff. So

[Denise Riley Hughes]: it has to have nots. And so now we've created a equitable ecosystem for everybody.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And we say designate staff, that's your staff you're talking about? That

[Denise Riley Hughes]: That were absorbed when ADS was created, yes. Okay. That never changed, that model never changed, and so it just created greater inequities.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, great. This is helpful.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Oh, excellent. So this is just part of the strategic plan. This is something that we had drafted and we are tracking to those breakthrough indicators and the success metrics. That doesn't change every year. This is the five year outlook. And so we're still we're about right in the middle of that coming into, you know, this calendar year. But we are on track for meeting all those requirements, and that's where you'll also see those four categories that I've shared before about user experience, predictability, standards, and reduced complexity. So I don't wanna get into too much detail unless there's something that catches your eye, but we also wanted to highlight some of the successes as well, things that have happened across the state that have gone well. These successes are specific to what the agency of digital services has done, and we are tracking very healthy now with these spaces. So what you will see next year is in core enterprise services, are 14 categories that are tied to the work done in that space. And this is any service that any user in state government should expect to have when they lock in the door. So they should expect a baseline level of security, and our baseline's not at the floor. It's about midway up. They should be able to have access to the state network to do their job. They should have access to foundational data supports. They can at least call someone and say, am I doing this the right way? They should have helped us. They should have desktop support. Those are non negotiables. So if we're supporting one group, we need to be supporting all groups equally. That's where you'll start seeing the measures that I've shared around performance, quality, and capacity.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Were there folks that had a higher level that

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: you had to reduce their level of

[Denise Riley Hughes]: service? No. Actually, we didn't. Good. What we did was we pressed capacity. So if we have x number of people supporting this current space and they're supporting 50% of state government, if we ask them to track to their current capacity being full, are we able to maintain that same level of quality? And so far, in the core spaces, we've been able to do that. We've also taken a little bit of time and cost from Stacy's team under ECMO. It's really the business transformation group. So that when new initiatives are desired or requested, we have gone ahead and made this team available to everybody, which is fantastic, because they were there working on a fingerprint background check process. They are working on some some of the grants management through the agency of education. And so these are things that haven't started out as IT, but there's a business demand that will require technology and it allows us to really uncover what the true need is, what the what the requirements are, what the outcomes are before we start solutioning the tech. And it's a good transition to make sure that they've got the right costs and business case built for it.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That gets complicated. Because I'm just finding out what we do at this state. Yes, I mean,

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: I think the real improvement here is instead of asking everybody to have all the answers upfront, when somebody comes in and says, I need a new grant management solution and just throwing a technology solution at them and trying to estimate costs, and then starting a procurement, what we're really doing is digging in, well, what do you really need? What is the business problem you're trying to solve? What are the outcomes you're trying to achieve? We bring business architects to the table, we do process improvement work with them. Justin Kenny, the Chief Performance Officer, is part of this process, we just do this whole triage with them over just a few weeks to really get a firm grasp on what it is they're trying to accomplish. And then, they can go in one of three directions. They can do a process improvement effort just using what they already have without having to purchase or buy or pay for anything new. And if they go that track, we can provide services there or Justin will lead that effort. If it is a technology solution, they may already have a technology solution that we're supporting. So then we would look at our core enterprise services or field service staff to come in and tweak it. It could be an automated workflow on SharePoint that solves their problem. And you don't have to go out and buy anything. And then if it looks like we do actually have to go out and procure something, we, at that point, start the procurement process with building out RFPs and that's when the project management office gets engaged and we develop a business case and cost workbooks and we have a much better grasp on where we're going, what's the outcome we want to achieve, how we're going to measure success, and how much we're going to actually cost the state by doing so. Because at that point, you know how long it's going to take, you know what the technology is you're buying, you know how much they're going to charge you for it, and you know how many staff you need and how long you need them for. Whereas in the old process, we're doing all of that way out here before we really knew what direction we were going in or if it was even the right direction. So, we're very excited. We've proven it out on a couple of initiatives already. The fingerprint background check process that the Secretary mentioned is a good example of that. That took a few weeks of doing a lot of discovery work with the business. There was some process improvement efforts that came out of it, but there's now an RFP, I believe, out on the street to procure a solution to come in and make it more efficient for all of state government, not just one entity. And that work included public safety. It included the child development division under the Department for Children and Families. I think the Department of Human Resources got engaged and the Agency of Education as well. So it was a real cross collaborative effort across state government, not just, it wasn't just public safety or CVD coming in and saying, help us with this. It was really looking at it across the whole ecosystem, which was really great.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah, that's great. So is that the fingerprints teachers need? Because there was an issue with that a couple of

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: years ago, so that's probably Daycare centers, teachers, state employees. Yeah, and they had

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: to wait a long time. And

[Denise Riley Hughes]: that level of empathy that that group of stakeholders put in is actually going to accelerate the process so that I anticipate by December, they will have the system fully in place and operational. So there's there's real measures and metrics associated with it around shortening the window from four months turnaround and not using the, I don't want to take words out of their mouth. They have an exception process that they call something. That's right. It's escaping my mind right now, but that should be exception and not the rule, and unfortunately, it's being used every time because the process is so long. Oh, okay. Yeah. The Right. The workaround. And before we before we solve it with rolling technology at it, they've now architected the entire demand, issue, problem, and desired outcome, and now it better informs the technology.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Great. So you've probably documented that, right? Yes. So if I wanted to know more, I'd

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: find Yep, it is. Okay, great.

[Kate Slocum]: Thank you.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: And you can always reach out for more. Security

[Denise Riley Hughes]: is a team sport. I think that this slide kind of speaks for itself. We monitor last year, was 358,800,000,000 security events. Now a security event is anything happening in the environment. It could be somebody logging on, logging, auditing, tracking, problems, incidents, bad actors, threats the bad actors are trying to make and they're not successful, anything would be considered that type of event. Through the work that our security office has done, they took a very intentional approach around improving operations and support of security. They take this role very, very seriously. And so they were looking at how they were handling tickets and cases and requests that were on average taking over thirty seven days to fully resolve. So there was a break in the system and a break in the process. They are now on average of of under four days. So, that's a huge improvement in response time, but it also allows us to really show those metrics around capacity and and performance. So we know what they're performing at now. We know what their capacity is right now. And if we ask them to do more, we could be sacrificing quality and performance of security response while over, you know, and and having an under capacity of resources. But without that data, it's really hard to make those decisions on what's needed for the state. We do get to talk a lot about data and AI, and I would just say that we I encourage you to go back and and read the details of the report if this is something that interests you, but CHAP E. Was something that we had launched last year. It is something only available to state employees and executive branch and elected offices that are being supported by ADS, but we've been able to roll out a service that has a higher level of security and privacy restriction that chat GPT or Gemini or commercial consumer service wouldn't have. And we are trending on new users every week, but an average of about 700 users a week accessing this across the state, which is pretty good for a grassroots system.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And then do you hear from the users on how it's going? Yes, there is a feedback loop.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: I probably don't need to cover this, but I'm sure everybody's very familiar with that and the work that the data team under the GIS group has done in regards to the school explorer in the district builder. That's been quite a bit of work that they've done, but they do this across state government for agency of natural resources, agriculture, transportation, many of the committees in legislature as well. And this is the one team within EDS that is public facing. So they're also running a committee that is made up of, I think, rural municipal. Gonna complete regional. It's that bad. I apologize.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: I'm sorry.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: After lunch, my Woah. Sorry. The Mutual Planning Commission, that's what I was thinking of. And so they are this is the highest number of interactions that they've had since VCGI was created. So they tracked a billion different map requests, map service requests this year.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So this, I know we got a lot out of them on the school district, the redistricting committee. They were wonderful and they were very easy to work with. So the Regional Planning Commission, is that the implementation of the new regulations?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Well, interface with the GIS team for very many different things happening among towns and communities and the regions across the state. This example was really just from the screenshots, what's happening around the education reform. And then they do a lot with housing and property data with towns as well.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah, so they started doing that

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: a couple

[Denise Riley Hughes]: of years ago, that's really good.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Very helpful.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: And interestingly enough, we've not, I'm showing you all these successes, we've not made a single tangible investment in any of these places. These are things that we're reusing existing technology and doing what we can to minimize, reduce, or mitigate the the overage cost of licenses and technology. And so, they've done a lot with a little and a very small team. AI systems inventory is required under statute, so every year you'll see that list, and I would say right now we have doubled the various AI systems across the state. We're looking to build some public private partnerships in regards to creating an AI hub interfacing with education and higher education in towns around problems that Vermont government is facing, the problems that Vermonters are facing, to be able to create a a safe test environment to allow for almost a pilot factory to operate and run so that we're not testing on state systems and with state production and data, but this is a early incubation project that they're working on. Let me get things over to Kate.

[Kate Slocum]: Wanna talk about budget?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Sure. Always. Right? But are there any questions? I feel like I'm really peppering you with fast talk and information. There's a lot

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: to cover. Is this you guys? Partial viewer? That you as well? Yes. Okay. Because I use that a lot. Excellent. Very, very helpful.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: I'm glad that it works on your mobile device too. It works.

[Kate Slocum]: Any other questions? Okay, so this slide right here shows what we refer to as one of our dashboards. It's kind of ADS in a snapshot from a financial perspective. In 2017, we put forward a budget of $96,500,000 and there's a breakout of how that budget is supported, what funding sources are supported. In the past, it was primarily an internal service fund called the Communication and Information Technology Fund. And you can see that actually, that has been broken up a little bit more this year. We have a variety of funds that are supporting our overall budget. Many of them are internal service funds, so that means that we will incur the costs, and then we look to how we need to recover for that. It could be a build back to an agency, uniquely to that agency, or it could be through some other methodology, whether it be based off of user count for core and price services, or based off of license count for an agency and department's consumption for CPU of private cloud, or it could be based off of a rate card for professional services consumed by an agency. So we now, instead of having the CIT primarily to cover those costs, we have three more internal service funds that are being established and proposed in '27. One of them is specific to what we formally referred to as bespoke, and it's about $5,000,000 to cover things like hardware, stock hardware, stock software products. We also have ADS enterprise offerings. That is for SLA services or enterprise I'm sorry. Not SLA services, SLA products. So enterprise products that are available to all consumers across the executive branch, Things like our private cloud consumption is found in there, or our automated call distribution services found in there, so that licensing associated with. The customers basically pay for what their needs and nothing more under that.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And what does SLA stand for?

[Kate Slocum]: Well, it stands for service level agreement, it really is a legacy term and something we're looking to change because it's confusing. It really doesn't fit offering any longer. It's a term that was inherited from our DII days.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, is it contracted services? Kind of.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: It is quarter price services, biggie sized. So everybody Is

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: that the technical

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: And I was gonna be, yeah. Yeah.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: C b I. So So

[Denise Riley Hughes]: it would be standard platforms that exist, but your individual agency consumption of it. So not a 100% of the departments and agencies are interested in consuming that, but we create an environment so that those that do need to consume it, we can limit the chargeback just to their portion of the consumption.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, like, optional, first. Exactly.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: But bespoke is the unique optional services. SLA would be the foundational services that they want more of.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: The standard services.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Yes. Yeah. So if somebody says, well, I'm I'm happy with I'm happy with the level of office hours help desk support, but we have staff that are here until midnight. So we want extra support. They would we would recover the everything beyond baseline. We would recover that through SLA. Okay.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: I know.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: That's alright. We tried to drive

[Denise Riley Hughes]: the SLA number down. That was really the biggest thing. But SLA is a charge in arrears. It's a it's a it's a a rear spending model. So we call it the credit card, but it's a deficit spend model because you consume it now and you don't have to pay for it later, but somebody's gotta float it. And the the SLA budget and the consumption grew greater year over year than the other categories in a way that was not controllable. And so focus on service not transaction, document the service and the consumers, and draw down the deficit spend model allows us to have greater predictability in the IT spend. It's just that it's gonna take a little bit more time to start scaling that or make a decision on whether or not we wanna charge in consuming year or if we want to continue floating the year in arrears model.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Oh, so it's not much in arrears. Was thinking it was maybe

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: a month.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Year. Twelve months. It's twelve months in arrears. So when we start talking about the predictability piece, it's it's not an ideal model to put a lot of a lot of workload in and a lot of IT services in because it's it's not controllable. So, we did successfully draw it down, and that was the establishment of core enterprise services. But, I would be happy if there were three categories, maybe four. Timesheet, which I'd like to diminish, SLA, core of our services, bespoke, but this is we're gonna test it out on this model this year. What I'd like to not do is recover from multiple funding sources for the same service.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Mhmm.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: And that that's gonna be the piece that makes it a lot harder to reconcile. I want to make sure that we've got exact cost of the service, how it recovered, what the total cost was, what the projection is. Is it seeing a industry inflation trend in that particular area or is it a service that we don't want to provide anymore? And so I think with the work that we're doing and the work that we're doing with finance and management, we now have some visibility to those trends that we never did before.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Alright. And is there an incentive for the departments to not use more than they

[Denise Riley Hughes]: need? Not today because we're still tracking to that performance.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Without your goal?

[Kate Slocum]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. That makes sense. Because it's like a utility, it sounds like to me. Sitting here, scoping it in, minding my own business.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: We've been working on this for two years, and so the opportunity to poke holes in it, where is it not working, and doesn't show the transparency so far, everything is pointing to this is the this is the right thing to do for Vermont. And this offers a level of transparency that I don't think that we've ever been able to provide before, that we've been wanting to and trying to, and this is now and naturally just built into our structural model.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Great. And what's the amount? What's the dollar? Just roughly. I'm just wondering if it's one of the the colors in the pie chart.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: It's three of the colors in the pie three of the colors in the pie chart. So, we we have another slide that goes over that. Yeah.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. I'm just wondering what time proportion that is of of the total. The total expenses are in that SLA category.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Oh, in SLA.

[Kate Slocum]: In the SLA, okay. Let me see if I can read the slide chart.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Just roughly.

[Kate Slocum]: It is 11, about 11,000,000. Okay.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Which it wasn't before. It's dropped down dramatically. I think

[Kate Slocum]: it was $11.40. 47. SLA was close to 30,000,000.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: That's what we were

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: doing.

[Kate Slocum]: Okay. So, we're at 11.7 now.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, you reduced it? Yes. And did you reduce it by reducing the amount of what you did and what they did versus putting it in another category?

[Kate Slocum]: Both. Sorry. Yeah. No, that's fine. We we did a little bit of shifting and that was to say, Okay, where are the consistent services for all customers? And if there is consistency in those services, let's make sure we're recovering it consistently as well. So in those instances, we took it out of SLA or out of timesheet and moved it under core enterprise services because it is a consistent service that everyone's consuming and everyone needs access to. So there was some shifting that happened as a result of that. There was some decrease as well because in doing that we were identifying, wait, we've been recovering this under maybe bespoke. We don't need to do that if we're consistently providing the service under foreign depressed services.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, yeah. So, that was the type of, that was the category rather than the event, but that makes sense. So,

[Kate Slocum]: the other thing we're supposed to report on annually is savings that have been either achieved or cost avoidance. Since the creation of our agency, we've been able to identify over $48,000,000 in savings and cost avoidance in the last fiscal year. We were able to identify $2,700,000 in those savings, which is pretty consistent with years past. Do about 2,500,000.0 to $3,500,000 in savings that we're identifying as we go along, and that's just from looking at what are we offering across the enterprise, where can we replicate that rather than rebuild it, rejigger it. So we've been pretty successful in that. And that's what the model that we have today. And when I say that, you'll see that this budget is a decrease from last year. Last year, we were at a $137,000,000. Now we're under that $100,000,000 mark. We're at $96,000,000. Part of that is because our bespoke spending authority has been changed and revamped quite a bit. We are looking at a $5,000,000 bespoke amount, where in past years we were looking at $30.40, $50,000,000 bespoke. So that is a big change from one year to the next.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Do you have a revenue stream or anything that you can make money of?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Not yet. Who? So once we have core enterprise services, we actually service over 20 municipal, we'll say town, towns in a particular department, so it's PDs. There is an opportunity to, once we have the quantified services in a competent service model quality structure, then they have the opportunity to potentially consume to those services. That is not what we like, right now, we're just passing through cost to them, flat cost, without the overhead. So they are getting access to IT staff and services for the what they're consuming, but they're only paying for, let's say, a license today.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Yep.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: We did talk about timesheet billing. So a timesheet billing, if we have we have two bill rates that were created in 2017? $2,101 and $88. That's something that's what lies I know and it's all over our map. But if you do the math on $84 and $88, then we would likely be paying people $50,000 a year to do pretty advanced IT stuff. So the time sheet billing area is deficit spend model. We knew going into timesheet billing of field services, and it that includes APO as well. We're about $7,000,000 deficit in field identified resources alone if we use the time sheet billing model. That's a problem. And so if we actually increase the rate, and we did this analysis, if we increase the rate at the same rate that the budget was increasing at that percentage, we would be at a 114 and $119 an hour, and we would be giving $70,000 back to the state this year. So we would be being able to balance our budget, recover the costs of IT and IT resources, and give money back to the state. That it was an oversight. It was not something that happened. And so hindsight's 2020. Right? So this is why we need to really focus on fixing this now so that we don't have an area of deficit spend, but we could open the door for potential revenue streams to divide down the cost of the per user rate of CES. I get way too excited about this because I'm really

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: No. I do believe it's

[Denise Riley Hughes]: the right thing for us.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: It's just It's it's definitely good. Do you need to

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: I should if I It's great

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: track it. I think because what I heard was that it's municipalities who

[Denise Riley Hughes]: are paying that now. Municipalities are paying. They're paying for the licenses today.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: But but that's the your the customer is towns. It's with Uber.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: It was an it was an example. Yeah. But I don't think that would I don't think that we would necessarily find that as necessarily a revenue stream. I think that we would find that as a cost per user reduction of core enterprise services. So It would be a way

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: of

[Denise Riley Hughes]: recovering. They'll be considered recovery to be revenue, but it's not a profit source. Right.

[Kate Slocum]: We are built on internal service funds. Part of the reason for that is so that the state can capitalize on federal grants that are out there or permit fees that are available and utilize that to pay for IT services. In some ways, it's a good model. The problem is, like Denise said, we haven't been able to adjust our rates over time. We haven't been able to classify our expenditures appropriately so that we really can use those opportunities to the state's best interest. For example, we've heard from other agencies and departments that, Hey, allocation number, I can't really use federal dollars to pay for that, or I can't bill your I can't take the timesheet bill that you've given me and apply that to a federal grant. It's just not the feds are not allowing it. They don't see it as equity being provided for these services across. This model brings us into an opportunity where we can look to capitalize on those federal dollars that are available for IT expenditures. The floods are a

[Denise Riley Hughes]: good example. FEMA wouldn't allow us to use ADS resources to do certain work because the chargeback of the 8488 didn't match the more mature model that over the last decade FEMA has moved to.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: And what's the mature model?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Their model matured more to show that our rate card didn't meet federal requirements and now under this new model it does. So, we can use state resources when we have situations with no federal spending. Alright.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Are those federal regulations, do you expect them to continue? Mean, are they are they logical? Do they make sense?

[Kate Slocum]: They do make sense. Yeah. Will it change?

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah. No. I mean, everything does change, but but if it and and it might be a model that's used in private sector too.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Yeah.

[Kate Slocum]: So Do

[Denise Riley Hughes]: you follow the next one? So this is the next one. I think we've delivered this.

[Kate Slocum]: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this just basically shows where we were.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Well, actually, everybody Oh. See? Yes. Oh, you guys didn't get, no, the colors are cool.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Oh, love that. It's fun.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: No, I I think it was actually an elegant way to describe this because it's It's

[Denise Riley Hughes]: kind of challenging. It is challenging. And so the colors in the circles indicate the recovery area that we're moving to. So we're moving to three specific areas, and it just goes to show that we peanut buttered everything across. I I use the word peanut butter because that's what it was used for. How do you break out the percentages? How do you validate and guarantee that you've been able to recover 100% of that cost if you have seven different recovery areas that you're tracking it through? So, we went for reducing complexity and the predictability.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, like timesheet, for example, is in the blue, so it's in, actually, that doesn't make sense. No, because it's also in the purple.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Yeah. So, we reduced timesheet. We reduced the number of staff that were aligned to a recoverable timesheet model, moved some of them into foreign price services, and so that now tracks their work on capacity. The field services is still built in a way that is timesheet billing recoverable, but once they move to a documented services model across the portfolios, we'll start seeing the reductions in the time sheet and we'll only see time sheet for projects.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And that's core enterprise?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: That's under the field services. Agencies yeah. Agency solutions. Okay. Yeah. We wanna be able to distinguish the independent project costs and the unique platform costs from the standard operations of IT and state government.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Yeah, let me ask you a question because we're going to a model where we pay the vendor forever in theory. I mean, there are twenty year contracts, ten year contracts.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: It all depends on I mean, if you're looking at a business critical system, like the DMV drivers, CT trips.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Yeah.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: That's a system that you wanna make sure that you have longevity built into the contract and the technology. But when it comes to some of our auditing systems or our, let's say, e signature or something like that, those are more commodity based systems that we do have the option of replacing and choosing different solutions over time.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, so you can own those and change them out. Yep.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Yeah. And that's the autonomy of the service model too, is that we've committed to a level of service, quality and performance. If we're not achieving that with the current system, we have that option to pull it out without having to do a massive high cost project. It's those business specific systems that need some attention. We don't want everything to be a massive $50,000,000 IT modernization project, but there is going to be some need for that and demand for it. But for each one of those, now the field services has to design their their support delivery around that platform, or that wasn't done before. They were just burning time on a system, but we didn't have any documentation to show, well, what is it that you're doing? What's the performance of the system? Is it meeting security requirements? Does it you know, what's the connectivity rate? And so now we're looking a little holistically at the ecosystem.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Great. So how many or what proportion of systems do you think are going to be in the DMV category?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: DMV, so we move them to enforcement regulation.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Well, that category, but the category of having annual payments.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Well, now that they're in what we call M and O, so maintenance and operations, that's where they just, they should have a standard rate annually as opposed to a big capital expenditure. Right. So That's part of the intake process that that Stacy was talking about is that the goal is not go live. That is not the outcome that we're trying to achieve in massive implementation projects. The the goal is driver services, car registrations, you know, you name it. Now if you turn around and say, well, we wanna add another service to DMV, there's already a system that exists in place that we can layer on top of. And if we're not achieving the outcomes that were set in that initial business plan and built for the solution, it's a lot easier to start seeing that data from from that regular annual cost and structure because we would be reporting it in the performance year, and then you would be able to see it in the costing piece too, so we know where the ups and downs are. I

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: think I follow what your question was, and that is the difference between cloud based which you pay an annual fee for versus server based program of which you purchase and then maintain. Is that what you were

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: talking Yes,

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Totally unit world thing. Every vendor, solution, every product is different regardless of whether it's cloud hosted, you know, internal hosted and or SaaS. So business continuity is the piece that I wanna focus on the most when it comes to that. So you can be cloud hosted in the state's data center. You could be cloud hosted in a third party data center. You could be cloud hosted in a state run cloud data center. So it's it's all different. But, yes, we would be moving to less of a CapEx model. Yes. More of a FinOps based model so that we know what the cost of the service is regardless of the power of the technology behind it. So if we need to make changes to the technology or say we're gonna reduce the cost of the service, you have all the data to to see what reducing would look like and where it would be reduced. If it's in the technology, if it's in the staff, if if it's in the technology staff, or if it's in flipping the vendor. But we don't have we can't give you those clear answers today because we're transacting tech. We're transacting at the little SKU level as opposed to looking at the whole service and everything that goes into hosting it, supporting it, and paying for it. Does that

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: make sense? Yes. But I wanna talk about this part. Yeah. I'm happy to.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: We do we are about 75% cloud hosted.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: What about what percentage of non CapEx data? The services that we paid for.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: That's what you're pulling up data on now. So we don't have that exact number, but these are the analysis that Kate's team is doing today with everything that we're running. Great.

[Kate Slocum]: Thank you. So this chart just basically shows you how our budget links back to the the diagram that was shown before. So the green towers that you see in here support for enterprise services. The purple towers, they support SLA and timesheet, also agency solutions, and the blue is the Visible, which is really specific to the customer's desire or need. So if we go to the next chart, this shows you the overall budget for AES from fiscal year twenty five when we started on this journey of identifying a need to move into core enterprise services. What '26 looked like, so you'll see there's that yellow that's pulled in to the CES line.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: That was a $15,000,000 appropriation to draw down the potential for double billing because we were pulling foundational services out of SOA.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay, double billing on your part. Right,

[Denise Riley Hughes]: we didn't want to bill the agency for in fiscal year at the same time that they're gonna get a bill for the last fiscal year for the same thing. Sounds like good That's what the yellow was. You all approved that. Thank you. It worked.

[Kate Slocum]: And then '27 shows that true year of core enterprise services costs compared to the demand services, which are timesheets, agency specific needs, and then the overall budget.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: So this is the first time, if you look at the blue, that was appropriations. So we were pretty static for eight years in about the same amount. Anywhere with 11 to $12,000,000 is what the EDS allocation was. So it really didn't cover the cost of services. It just lessened the cost of build back. And we're not doing that anymore. This is the first time that you'll see in the budget package that there is a, I think, $9,000,000 general fund appropriation. So that is covering the $44,000,000 cost of core enterprise services to lessen the the charge back rate to the agencies. So finance management came up with a formula that is based on a per user rate that you'll probably hear some agencies talk about because it it is large, it's 4x what the original appropriation was. Under allocation. Under allocation, but with the demand driving down, the overall cost is actually dropping. Interesting, but

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: the per unit So cost is the blue plus the red equals the green, right? Okay.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Yeah. So the cost of IT spend based on what we have in our visibility is dropping down And it gives us an opportunity to really manage those two, a hard number. Agencies run their business office a little bit differently, so where they draw their funds from, that's something that we don't have visibility into. That is something that now that they're seeing QuantiFER Services for the first time, they feel like they're paying more for IT, it's just coming in under a different view. They won't be charged at the end of the year for a level of consumption, and it will be equitable across the board. And we're also dropping deficit spend by quite a bit.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: It's a lot to go over, and I hope I didn't bore you off. No. Not at all. But this is

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And we actually

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: see this a couple

[Kate Slocum]: Yeah. Of

[Denise Riley Hughes]: I think that we've talked about it now a couple of years. We've we're working closely with JFO as well to make sure that we've not missed something. We've worked across state government with our various business partners. We actually met with the attorneys and sheriffs yesterday and talked through what it is. This isn't displacing their internal resources by any means, but it gives their internal resources the support that they need to be able to provide access to their broader user community.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: And now we're jumping into projects. Projects. All yours. All mine. Okay. So

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: last year we participated in some testimony about our dashboard and how we're reporting out project performance and spent some time reevaluating how we were actually defining our status categories and our risk categories. So, we've updated our project status categories that you see on the screen here to simplify it so that getting to one of our strategic activities is to make things less complex and meet the user where they are. And so this gives the Vermont citizen who might be looking at our dashboard better understanding of what does green really mean, right? What does yellow mean? So, we basically lessened some of the complexity of what was in our previous categories, which went a little too detailed into percentages and stuff that really aren't necessarily accurate. They vary from project to project and make them a little bit easier to understand. So you'll see those new status and risk definitions on the dashboard. At the bottom of it, you'll see where everything's now defined in an easier way. Not only does it tell you what does green mean, what does yellow mean, what does red mean, but also why it matters. Why is it important to understand these different categories when you're managing projects. It's basically what tells the team things are going well, we don't have any perceived blockers or hurdles coming up that we need to get over. Yellow means there might be an issue coming up that we want to pay attention to or there's a risk that something could happen. Maybe we find out that somebody's retiring, for example. Okay, so that means we need a succession plan or we need to do something to mitigate that risk, right? And then rent is usually the project team has done all they can to avoid a risk and now we need somebody with authority to come in and help us. It might be in contract negotiations, it might mean for funding, it might mean for staff, and as the PMO, we don't have that authority, so we might go to our secretary or one of the other partners that we're working with and ask them for help. All this does is that these are things that we do to make sure that we avoid catastrophic issues or issues to arise. Once they become an issue, then they're a problem we're all trying to solve. But a risk is supposed to help us kind of perceive issues coming up and get ahead of them and solve them before they actually do cost of art and projects.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: And these snapshot metrics, so you can see a project in the yellow one week and two weeks later it could be the green. So, it's just a point in time.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Put the slide to that.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: I think they're behind.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: He is behind.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: He's

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: little bit at the wheel.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Get I'm gonna get it. Get anyway, see you after this. So,

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: yes, what Denise was saying is true. The annual report and these metrics are a point in time snapshot of project performance and capacity. So, we ran data for the annual report in December, and it actually ran on New Year's Eve exactly, to try to give you guys as close to real data as So, we at that time we had 48 active projects, 68% of them were on track, 25% had risks that were being managed, and 7% were at that level where we needed leadership to get involved and kind of help us solve for problems. I think on the dashboard today we're like at 52 projects, now we're 51, something like that. So that dashboard gets updated every week versus the annual report which is up to here. So, that's that. Do people look at it every week? The dashboard? Yeah, actually. Lisa does.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: There are a few others that reach

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: out every once in a while too, but I actually have set an expectation with my team. So, getting to the portfolio structure that Denise was talking about, for each of those portfolios, enforcement regulation, life and learning, I have a portfolio manager assigned. And then I have a deputy director for the PMO. We're in the process of recruiting for a director. And their responsibility is to look at that dashboard and make sure that one, there aren't any gaps in data, nothing's missing or gone awry. And then if there is, they go back into our project management tool and try to resolve those discrepancies. So they are supposed to be reviewing it and then the PMs update the data every week. So every Friday they have to have all their project data updated in the tool and the dashboard runs Monday morning as a refresh and pulls that data out into the dashboard. That's the cycle. So, every week it's getting looked at, every week it's getting updated, and that's how we kind of maintain oversight over those projects. And internally, do you find it help? Yes, I do, actually. It's a big portfolio, And so, I think the real value of the dashboard and the tool that we have is that we can see all of the projects across the enterprise. In the past, you couldn't have that transparency and visibility. It would have been impossible, right? If you think about it, I think the Agency of Human Services, for example, they probably have, I don't know, ten, eleven projects just within their agency. In the past, they would not even have a dashboard, but they might have Excel spreadsheets that were maintaining some of that data that you see today. But that wouldn't include things going on at the Agency of Commerce and Community Development or the Department of Labor or DMV, right? You wouldn't see all of those. So, two things. You wouldn't get a good enterprise view of how projects are performing across the executive branch, across the government. Two, you'd have no idea how much money you were spending in You could go to AHS and ask them, how are your projects tracking? How much money are you spending? But even back before ABS was created and the Enterprise Project Management Office was created, AHS was siloed. They didn't have an agency view. Every department had its own little project management office. They did create an agency level project management office, but it depended on the Department for Children and Families and the Department of Remote Health Access to provide them data to inform it. So, back then, it was very disjointed. You couldn't get a good clear view of how projects were performing. Now, with the tools that we have, not only can we see how projects are performing across the executive branch, we can also see how much we're spending. We can also look at resource capacity. We finally have a tool today that I can use that says, from a state perspective, we are at capacity or overcapacity on state project managers that we can assign. What that does is it tells me when a business partner comes in the intake and says, I need to do this thing, we can look at it and say, I don't have a state resource for this, which means we have to go out and get contracted support. That opens up a dialogue with the business partner that says, you know, that's a cost. Getting to what Denise and Kate were saying, know, our rate's $88 an hour for project managers. Contracted support is close to $300 an hour for a company. It's a big difference, right? I now have a tool though that gives me the data I need to project into the future and say, you know what, I can't give you that PM today on the state side, but in three months I can. Can we slow roll this a little bit to free up those resources? And then oftentimes what you'll see is a lot of those contracted resources end up in agencies that have federal funding because the other agencies don't have the benefit of a federal fund to pay for those repurchases. So, the state resources end up on other things because, and frankly, just being completely upfront, like, is your biggest federal spend. It's the biggest department. It is. With their implementation, especially if it's a Medicaid funded project, it's 90% federally funded. So, if I'm sitting here balancing, do I put a state PM on DMV versus Medicaid funded project? I'm probably going to put the state PM on DMV because DMV is less likely to have 90% federal funding. So sometimes that can come into it, but the tool really informs capacity more than it does that. It just owes that dialogue with the business partner. That's not to say that ultimately my goal would be eventually to reduce our reliance on contractors. I would like for us to be able to have more state resources involved in these projects and less contracted support. And that's because, one, contracted support's very expensive. Two, there's an additional level of oversight that's required that is time consuming. Whereas, you know, I can have my portfolio managers focus on training and development of their junior staff to help them with their career growth and doing better project management versus spending all of their time making sure contractors are staying true to our standards. It's a lot easier to have a state employee follow the standards that the state has developed than it is a contractor who's going to come in and utilize their role.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: How does somebody navigate, you got one department over here that really thinks that they need to get information over there, two separate departments, how do they get into that department? Do they get somebody assigned from your department to go in and grab that information? Are they allowed to freely go from one department to another to get information? They're trying to do a project or trying to figure something out. You've transportation that's looking and all that. How does that navigate?

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Well, depends, right? So in my world, if there's an IT project, DMV's a good example. And this is partially why I think the new portfolio model helps with this. But when we were rolling out DMV Core, there was one technology element that needed to be factored in, and it's a very technical term called the message switch. So, the message switch is part of the dispatch business process, where if I'm at DMV enforcement and I pull somebody over, I need to find out what their traffic records are, right? So, this message switch is a thing that connects DMV public safety law enforcement, right? And to courts. And to courts. To so, what happens is DMV doesn't own that contract. The Department of Public Safety does. So my team has the ability to say, hold on, let me contact my counterpart over here in Public Safety, which could be a field services IT manager or another project manager that's working on a similar effort. And then we can connect the two business partners together. And in this case, we were able to work with DMV and Public Safety on a contract amendment that allowed for changes to the message switch to allow the driver services and vehicle services project to continue.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: But it almost has to be 20 fourseven. I mean, if they're out there in the field and they're looking for that information, okay, so how does that communicate back and forth?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: In a project, that's a good explanation of the project. In in sustainable operations, it already exists. So that's already determined to be a business critical twenty four seven system. And so the uptime has to be available all the time. If it's not, that's where security comes in where we get alerting to see if something is down or if something's not working. What we don't have alerting on is we don't have alerting on court systems. The courts moved out of the state environment two years ago now. And so that's something that we are sorting through under more of a inter branch

[Kate Slocum]: service agreement. Mhmm.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: But, yes, the business criticality systems where you wanna make sure that data is interfacing on the regular as part of the operations, those those systems exist today. What we need to do is make sure that we track more of them. Summer EBT was another example, where there's interface of both AOE data and DCF data and, I think it's DCF, two different ones in DCF. Yeah. As the facilitator to ensure that they can collate their information in one single place and that we are protected if there are restricted components associated with them, but the data is not ours. We really are just either the custodian or the facilitator or the service provider to make sure that they can maintain continuity

[Kate Slocum]: of the operation.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Even then, protect privacy, there's gotta be a sign in of somebody to be able to go there there would and be access, obviously denied if they didn't have the proper address.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Correct. Yeah, that's part of that least privileged access model that we take with security. Some of the legacy systems can't handle that concept, and so we have to build a little wrapper around it and then restrict access all the way around. That does make that collaboration limited.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: So, the other thing that the tool does is it allows us to provide performance metrics like this with a schedule and budget variance. So, last year on the annual report, we were able to include the budget variance charts with each project, which basically just shows how the budget increased or decreased over the time while the project was ongoing. This year we were able to add schedule variance as well, so it will show those changes in the schedule. What that does is it just lets us know that things have happened on this project that have caused the schedule to go out or shorten, the budget to increase or decrease, and then if questions come up, we know to go to a certain area to look at, like change orders and those types of things that would have led to that.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: So, do have a question for the members of the committee. Have any of you been on the dashboard, looked at the dashboard, had feelings or thoughts or feedback about what it's giving you for information?

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: No, it's more than one question.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: Know. Fine. I'm on the dashboard,

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: and in terms of feedback on the information that it's giving, I think in general, not having the IT experience, seeing the red, you get freaked out. Yeah. Want to be explained. I know it's happening again on dashboard, but hoping you Yeah. Maybe you will do that. But but that's my sort of Yeah. Very brief feedback.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: I would say if you see the red over time, expect that secretaries, deputy secretaries, commissioners should be able to speak on what's happening because that would mean that it would be escalated to the point where we've been notified about something. If it's in the yellow, not always. We're touching everybody's stuff, so we tend to be much more plugged in, but that would be a good rule of thumb.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Yeah, and I always The colors. The red, it's an interesting, that's an interesting comment that you make. And what I've experienced over several years of doing this with even our business partners, nobody

[Denise Riley Hughes]: wants to see red on their set. No.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: And in fact, they'll even negotiate me sometimes. We leave?

[Denise Riley Hughes]: In Hamburg? I know.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: It's an international standard. So, it's not something we just We made up here in follow what's called the Project Management Institute body of knowledge. It's an international standard. All project management industries use this. But what I tell people is RED is not meant to scare anybody and it's not meant to make anybody feel bad. What it is, is it's supposed to alert us that we have a significant issue and we need help solving it. And that's really what RED means. It doesn't mean that the whole project is a failure. One of the most common reasons you will see RED as a risk on any project is resource constraints, and that is a fact of state government. No matter what agency you're working with, no matter who the business partner is, no matter how critical the system is that we're trying to build, there are never enough staff. And the problem with it is on the IT side, it's easy to go out and get contractors come in and help us manage things, right? On the business side, it's not. So not only are we asking a lot of our business partners to bring people to the table to help us write requirements, help us approve a design document, make sure that, they're testing the system as it's being developed to ensure that it's working according to their expectations, they're doing all of that, which is a full time job in itself, on top of their operations responsibilities. It's very rare that our business partner agencies have the funding or capacity to backfill staff who are allocated to these projects. So when you look at UI modernization, for example, the Department of Labor staff that process unemployment insurance claims, quite a few of them are located at National Life with the vendor and with our team on the delivery of a new UI modernized system, there's nobody backfilling them back down at Green Mountain Drive to process claims. So, they have to accommodate both. And so, that's the biggest reason you have risk, is resource constraints. Obviously, funding is always an issue too, right? So, you might have a good bucket of federal dollars when you start, and the longer a project takes to get going, more constraints you might have on that funding because you didn't anticipate it. You didn't anticipate a contract taking two years to negotiate. Those are things that can really drag down a project and put you in the red. But they're not insurmountable. It just means I need somebody with authority to come in and help. And it might mean going out and getting temp employees. It might mean, you know, coming here and asking you all for more money, which is never a comfortable seat to put our leaders in, but sometimes that's the reality. I'll cross the hall.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: A plan, man. Good to know.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: I'm gonna make a note of that, though. So anyway, I just try to encourage people not to look at red as a really bad thing. Mean, it's not great. None of us wanna see red or dash It means we're doing the- our job.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Not coming to get it. Why don't we just go to the slide of the dashboard? Yeah. Because that can be the last slide.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Yeah. So the one we glossed over is just the projects that closed last year and you can see that in the report. This is what the dashboard looked like when we created the slide deck. So, it's a little bit of an eye chart, but the first page of the dashboard gives you these widgets to just kind of give you a snapshot in time of how overall the enterprise is functioning. It tells you the overall status, so currently there's 52 projects. I think it's seven yellow. How many red? Three. Three. Well, that's good. And then the rest is green, right? Total change in project duration in month by agency. So, this just shows how many projects increased their duration over, I think it says, by agency. So, like AHS, the reason that one's so big is really it's the integrated eligibility. That's one that they've been planning for for several years. But they have some other big ones too, like CCWIS, which is the replacement of the child welfare system, the child development information system is another one. So, there's some really big projects that they're managing and so that's why you see them so large. Annual operating versus implementation budget by fiscal year. So, those are just snapshots in time at an enterprise level. Page two is the project inventory. That's the one people are most interested in. So, it gives you a list in alphabetical order by agency of all of the projects. The first column is what we call the project start date and the second column is the implementation start date. And what's the difference between those two dates? So the project start date is the date that the PMO first received the request to manage a project. It's the very first time anybody heard of it. In your department? In my department. Yeah. PMO has it. They might be going into a procurement process, so it's not actually in execution or what we call execution yet. That's what the implementation start date is. So when you look at ACCD grants management solution, it came into the PMO in 2022 and implementation started in 2024. That 2024 date is the date you started working with a system implementation vendor.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: That's when the schedule starts on the project.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Right. That's when the schedule actually starts. So, that's more important date than the project start date because that is the date that we start really spending money on the project. We negotiated a contract with a vendor. We have a baseline schedule. We have a baseline budget. Everything's kind of set to start.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, is the project start date when the customer or they think it's starting?

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Well, it's really the date that everybody approves the project to move forward. So in other words, the business partner has told us, We have the money to pay for this, and the CIO has said, Yep, and that aligns with our tech strategy. So everybody's agreed to move forward with the project. That's what that date is.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: And it could also be that we need to get the RFP going, we need to get resources on board, and in some cases, even on the federal side, are expending dollars, so the IEANE project, we have expended dollars because we are paying more resources to get us up to the point where we're at now, is contract negotiations. Yeah. Those dates mean a lot for us. And so if we had a utility that would allow us to see some trend analysis, we would be actually able to see time over time which agencies are going from conception date to actual start date and and you may see some variance on delay. You could look at it from a project overrun based on a number of agencies. And so we're still looking at snapshot data. We don't have the trend analysis.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Our tools don't allow for that.

[Robert Plunkett (Vice Chair)]: Right.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: We are Not yet. We have found some very economical tools that allow us to do what we are doing here, but we do see opportunity for improvement.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Okay. So then the initial completion and estimated completion dates, it's basically the same concept. The estimated completion date is based on that same baseline that the implementation survey is. So in other words, when we first get a project, we kind of do a, how long do we think it's really going to take to deliver this thing? That becomes your initial completion date, right? So we're thinking that should only take eighteen months, right, based on what we know about the technology or what we think we know about the technology. The estimated completion date then becomes the real date because the contractor has said, well, it's not going to take eighteen months, it's actually going to take two years. That changes that date, right, because they've now come in with their expertise and the fact that it's their solution that they're building and they know how their staff operate and they know all the pitfalls they're going to run into working with the state agency. So, that's a better baseline. So, the second column and the first column basically establish your scheduled baselines and what we start to really track performance against. That's where, as I like to say, the rubber hits the road, if you will. Everything up to then is the car is still up on the jack and the tires are being put on. Once you get to those dates, then you've got it on the road moving forward.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: So, using the first one as an example, housing infrastructure. So implementation start date isn't there yet. Right. So you haven't, your department hasn't started working on it. Correct. But there is still an estimated completion date.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: There is an estimated completion date

[Denise Riley Hughes]: and I'm not really sure This that's part of that pulling, like, when Stacy had said that she asked the team to review this weekly to make sure that the data is accurate and updated, we do manually pull this so there are some times when the data feed won't fully pull all data sets over, so that could be an example.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Well, or they might have put the date in the wrong field.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: What there's a statutory That could be too. I mean, where it said in statute, this will be done by 2020 Yeah,

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: that very well could be too. Yep. Yeah.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: But the dashboard isn't, we don't, it's not the ability to make it that interactive where they could go that way into the detail.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: I would love at some point to have a dashboard that would allow us to drill down because then you could click on it and click down a couple layers to get to a little bit more detail. Don't have that capability today.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: And one that you didn't have to manually. Yeah. Yeah.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Yeah, I mean unfortunately it is every data element on this dashboard has a finger on a keyboard putting that data into a system. And sometimes they miss, like there's multiple data fields. I'm not going to get into a lot on how the tool's configured. I'm happy to give you a demo of it someday if you want, but you probably would be like, oh god.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: No, think we only care about typos, right?

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Right. But yeah, I mean, they might put it in the wrong deep field because they think they're in the right screen and they should've moved to a different screen and it happens, but that's why we do quality control checks and so that one is something I will make sure is fixed. Is your goal to have it be automated? Yes, it's a goal, yeah. I've been talking with our Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer about basically rebranding the dashboard and using some different ways to bring that data forward. We have some ideas, but nothing that's really concrete yet. We haven't even shared it with our secretary yet. It's very high level, whiteboarded out and a picture on someone's phone.

[Denise Riley Hughes]: So very technical. But if that's something before we launch, we would definitely make sure we would have some committees.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: One thing I will say, we're very invested in continuous improvement. So additional columns on the project inventory came out of last year's work with the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee, so very open to feedback, suggestions, questions, things that you guys would like to see. If we have the tools to do it, we're more than happy to do it. I

[Denise Riley Hughes]: know that we've probably overseed our welcome.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: No, you will never overstay your welcome because there's always so much It to talk

[Denise Riley Hughes]: was amazing that we covered, I think, 300 pages in just two hours. That is the extent of the report. Light reading. A lot of detail, a lot of good detail, and we're open to feedback, suggestions, concerns, comments. Great. Pat them back.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: We probably get everything. Thank

[Denise Riley Hughes]: you very much.

[Stacy Gibson Granfield]: Thank you. Thank you for

[Denise Riley Hughes]: your time.

[Wendy Harrison (Chair)]: Okay. Do we have any other Anyone else want to speak?