Vermont digital services outlines plan to centralize core IT, questions web-portal self-funding and data-sales visibility

Denise Scribe, secretary for Agency Digital Services and chief information officer for the state, told the Vermont House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on April 22 that ADS is moving to a “core enterprise services” model to reduce fragmented, hard-to-predict IT spending and gain economies of scale.

Scribe said the core-services effort aims to cover help desk and desktop support, networking and security, enterprise architecture and project management — functions she described as “non negotiables” that should operate as a single platform rather than being repeatedly purchased on a per-agency basis.

"When I look at 8% of the overall IT spend is what we would consider predictable," Scribe said. "That means 92% of that money is going to continue driving that friction and frustration of the unknown." She told the committee ADS has been auditing chargeback and timesheet billing practices and wants to reduce duplicate payments and unexpected growth in SLA and bespoke charges.

Why it matters: Committee members are considering statutory and budget changes to how Vermont funds technology. ADS officials said current recovery models and a longstanding statute that makes the state web portal “self funded” are creating operational friction and limit options for hosting, accessibility work and cross-agency integration.

Josiah Ray, the state's chief data and AI officer, described the statutory web-portal structure as out of date and said it has driven a vendor-centered self-funded arrangement that pools transaction and card-swipe fees to pay for site hosting and a standardized site template.

"So the web portal, the statute says self funded, and that's a lot of question marks," Ray said. He said the portal contract covers the Vermont-branded template and hosting (the vermont.gov pages and agency templates managed under a single contract with a portal vendor), and that the state currently has "a 60,000 web pages" footprint to review for accessibility and currency.

Ray and Scribe said the self-funded model limits ADS's ability to plan and to take on projects that are not directly covered by transaction fees — for example, accessibility improvements or broader platform work that would benefit agencies that do not generate payment transactions. Scribe noted that the portal's transaction and brokerage fees are reported to the web portal board under contract, but ADS does not control the fee collection mechanism and does not receive those revenues directly.

On data sales and brokerage, Scribe told the committee, "ADS as an agency is not selling data. We are custodians of data." She said ADS does not currently have full visibility into revenue or contracts where agencies may be receiving payment for data sharing, and that those transactional arrangements generally flow through individual agency business offices rather than through ADS financial systems.

Members of the committee pressed for options. Representative Kumar asked how the current funding structure tangles with web development and user experience. Scribe and Ray explained that the statutory requirement for a self-funded portal has made it difficult to treat static content and interactive applications as a single, seamless user experience and has steered the state toward using a single portal vendor to collect and administer transaction fees.

The ADS leadership described a two-year path to clearer cost-and-capacity metrics for core services and said they will seek legislative support in the next session to fund enterprise IT services. Scribe said ADS's current enterprise funding request is "about $10,000,000" and that, when core services are fully analyzed, they estimate roughly a $42,000,000 baseline for predictable enterprise IT spend (a figure Scribe emphasized she wants to lower through consolidation and better procurement).

On data governance, Ray and Scribe said ADS has started a data-inventory effort to catalog automated feeds, MOUs, data-sharing agreements, and other points where state data is shared with federal agencies, other states or private partners. Ray said the inventory work has identified roughly 300 data feeds so far and that the state's open data portal is only one part of the overall landscape.

Scribe described current contract review processes intended to limit inappropriate data resale or reuse: contracts with digital-data elements are reviewed through ADS's Procurement Advisory Team (PAT) and must meet state terms for data protection. She said ADS has refused or nearly terminated negotiations with vendors unwilling to accept the state's terms in recent modernization projects.

Committee next steps and timeline: ADS officials recommended waiting until core enterprise services have a baseline in place and accessibility and content cleanup work are underway before proposing statutory changes to the web-portal self-funding requirement. Scribe told the committee she would be prepared to deliver a more detailed package next January and work with committee members in the interim.

The session included multiple technical and statutory clarifications (DMV data constraints, the web-portal board reporting cycle, and separate IT arrangements for the judicial and legislative branches). ADS officials repeatedly emphasized that they can request data and agreements from agencies and are actively expanding review of expiring contracts and data arrangements.

The committee did not take formal votes on funding changes or statutes during the meeting.

Scribe closed by urging a measured approach: establish core enterprise services first, measure and cost them, then propose statutory or funding changes so the Legislature can budget predictable, centralized IT funding rather than respond to large, episodic project requests.