Committee, Agency of Digital Services agree on outcome-focused IT reporting; dashboard to show on-time, on-budget indicators

The House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee continued work on draft committee bill 250896 on Feb. 26, focusing on how the Agency of Digital Services (ADS) will report on information-technology projects. Committee members pressed for statutory language that ensures the public and the Legislature can see whether projects are on time and on budget; ADS officials previewed a public dashboard and said the agency will expand annual reports and provide more frequent updates to the committee.

Representative Kathleen James, chair of the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee, said the bill’s purpose is to “be really clear about what kind of data we’re looking for and what kind of data we think would be useful to us,” and stressed the intent that statutory reporting survive changes in leadership so the public and future legislatures retain oversight.

ADS officials described a two-part approach: a redesigned annual report produced by the Enterprise Project Management Office and an interactive public dashboard. Stacy Gibson, project management office director for the Agency of Digital Services, said the annual summary will include project scope, budget, timeline and status and will “include details as to changes over time, including project closure details and indicators of projects being on time and on budget.” Gibson added that the agency plans to publish a clearer narrative of changes such as change orders and budget variances once staff enter the historical data into ADS’s project tools.

Committee members and ADS staff debated how prescriptive statutory language should be. ADS urged outcome-focused statutory text rather than highly specific project-management terminology, arguing that prescriptive terms risk becoming outdated as industry practices evolve. Gibson told the committee that some project details are not available for every project at every stage — for example, implementation start dates, original completion dates and change-order documents vary by project — and that ADS needs time to enter archived change orders and schedules into its management tool before the annual report can present a fully detailed change history.

ADS demonstrated the live dashboard the agency published. The dashboard currently lists 58 projects overseen by ADS, grouped by agency, and includes project start date, implementation start date, an estimated completion date, an initial implementation cost and a current implementation cost. Gibson said the dashboard already shows color-coded indicators for scope, schedule, budget and risk and that staff are working to add hoverable details and links to supporting documents where appropriate. ADS staff said the dashboard is updated routinely (their process documents show weekly updates) and that the committee will receive a committee-specific update on a quarterly cadence while the public-facing dashboard will be refreshed regularly.

Lawmakers pressed for specific data elements to remain visible in statute. Representative Campbell asked explicitly for traceability to original project expectations, saying the Legislature should be able to see “original and current estimated date[s] of completion” and why those dates changed. Representative Putnam emphasized the need to track change orders and the reasons projects slip, calling that trend analysis important for future oversight. ADS agreed to include a stronger purpose sentence in the bill — that public reports should give a clear understanding of whether projects are on time and on budget and, if not, why — and to work with Legislative Counsel on language that balances statutory durability with operational flexibility.

Committee members and ADS staff also discussed practical limits: ADS does not have authority to require other departments to charge staff time to a project code, so staffing costs and some business-side lifecycle costs can be reported “when provided and available” by the client department or agency. ADS recommended retaining language requiring records for projects under EPMO oversight (a threshold previously used in practice); the committee agreed to keep that scope rather than attempt to mandate access to all agency budgeting systems.

No formal votes were taken at the Feb. 26 meeting. The committee directed ADS to provide a revised draft of the bill that incorporates the agreed purpose language and the changes discussed for the annual report and dashboard. ADS said it will publish an updated dashboard and provide a committee-specific report in March; the committee indicated it may pursue final markup and a possible vote later in the week so the bill could reach the floor next week if timing permits.

The committee and ADS also noted a related Agency of Human Services project, the VTIES effort, which includes federal funding and separate CMS reporting requirements; ADS confirmed the project will continue to be tracked within the EPMO material but funding requests related to that AHS project are handled by AHS’s business office.

The next procedural steps are for ADS to deliver revised statutory language to Legislative Counsel and for the committee to schedule a markup vote after members have reviewed the updated draft and the dashboard improvements. The committee’s staff and ADS officials said they will continue to refine the dashboard and annual report content and presentation so the public and Legislature can track project progress and changes over time.