Vermont CIO ‘taking a step back’ on modernization projects

Vermont Chief Information Officer John Quinn has been eager to talk about the $140 million his state legislature has set aside for IT modernization over the next several years. The pot of money, he’s said in several recent interviews, will allow his Agency of Digital Services to overhaul and replace many Vermont IT systems.

First up will be the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles, Quinn told StateScoop earlier this month during a video interview at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers midyear conference in National Harbor, Maryland. It’s a project that could set the tone for other modernization efforts to follow.

“I’m stepping back and looking at it from the enterprise,” he said. “There’s so many things that are involved with DMV modernization outside of the DMV. What does our digital identity look like for the citizen? What is our integration platforms that we’re going to use? How are we going to make sure whatever we build can be repeated in the future?”

Quinn said the DMV modernization will use an “all-in-one” solution that provides not just vehicle and driver services, but can also plug into the rest of the state enterprise to give a “360 view of the citizen to help them.”

After the DMV, Quinn said, it’s onto Vermont’s unemployment insurance system, which will be moved from a 50-year-old mainframe and into a cloud platform. He said he’s also planning a replacement of the state’s enterprise resource planning system, which should take about three years.

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