Mark Combs, Vermont’s tech and enterprise services chief, to retire
Mark Combs, Vermont’s first chief technology and enterprise services officer, is gearing up for retirement, but will stay on board long enough for the state to find a replacement, a spokesperson for the Agency of Digital Services confirmed on Thursday.
Combs, whose retirement was first reported by Government Technology, has been a fixture in Vermont’s tech leadership since 2017, shortly after the state established the Agency of Digital Services to centralize IT work that had been spread across agencies. Initially hired as chief technology officer, his role expanded to include broader oversight of enterprise technology services across the state government.
The state is recruiting his replacement, describing a search for a “visionary technology leader” who can drive statewide strategy, innovation and operational excellence, according to a LinkedIn post by Denise Reilly-Hughes, Vermont’s state chief information officer.
“This role is an opportunity for a leader who wants to make meaningful impact – someone who can connect strategy to execution, bringing teams together across organizational boundaries and help shape a sustainable, forward-thinking ecosystem across government technology in Vermont,” Reilly-Hughes wrote in her post, describing Combs’ position.
Combs helped lead the effort to modernize the state’s legacy technology platforms and consolidate an inventory of about 1,400 major business applications across various state agencies. During an online event by VMware in 2021, he said the initiative reflected a larger effort to modernize IT budgeting, one in which cloud services are appropriately sized and unused services are removed.
“We’ve been on a journey the last four years of really picking the future and opportunistically moving everybody toward that future,” Combs said in 2021. “We’ve gone essentially from providing infrastructure as a service to platform as a service and dev-ops as a service.”
Combs co-chaired the Vermont Council on Artificial Intelligence, a group advising state leadership on AI adoption and governance. The council, which is led by Josiah Raiche, the state’s chief data and AI officer since 2024, has delineated proper uses of AI and created a standard language template for state employees to use when citing the use of AI in their work.
