House Appropriations committee hears Agency of Digital Services plan to apply $15 million to service-based IT budget

The House Appropriations Committee on Jan. 6 heard a presentation from the Agency of Digital Services about how the agency plans to deploy a $15,000,000 appropriation to change how state IT services are budgeted and billed.

Denise Riley Hughes, Secretary of the Agency of Digital Services and the state's chief information officer, told the committee ADS has spent the last six months building a more holistic model for FY27 and wants to "take it from a very complex, unwieldy process into something that's a lot more predictable, transparent, explainable, and tied to services." She said the aim is to make clear what agencies are paying for and to reduce unexpected bills that previously appeared after spending had occurred.

The presentation explained that under the old, transaction-based recovery model agencies were billed in different ways — service level agreements (SLA), timesheets at legacy rates, bespoke contracts or by allocation — which produced reconciliation…