State’s technology office more than doubles number of completed projects in 2025

Nearly 90,000 tech support tickets handled; 52,697 vendor invoices processed; 4,559 PCs freshly configured; and four pay cycles processed for more than 15,000 state employees.

2025 was a busy year for the state’s IT department, formally known as the Division of Enterprise Technology Strategy and Services (ETSS), a subunit of the Rhode Island Department of Administration.

“The work performed with our state agency partners in 2025 is unprecedented,” Chief Digital Officer Brian Tardiff writes in his introduction to the agency’s 64-page annual report submitted to the legislature on Jan. 30. 

The report, covering the calendar year ending Dec. 31, 2025, was uploaded for public viewing Monday. 

The technology office’s unusually busy year saw the successful completion of 114 projects, according to the report. In 2024, the agency reported only 46 projects completed at year’s end. That meant the agency also closed out 2025 with fewer active projects — 87 in all — compared to over 100 last year.

Overall, the agency says it processed 316 items on its to-do list in 2025 — more than double the 154 reported in 2024.

The heavy lifting was partially thanks to two high-profile sagas that threw the often unsung agency into the public spotlight: the RIBridges breach of late 2024, which stretched into the new year, and the conclusion of a multiyear rollout of the state’s new payroll system.

The new system is known by the shorthand of ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning, a common nickname for large-scale IT deployments often pursued by state governments and businesses whose aging systems need a refresh. The new system replaced Rhode Island’s old mainframe-based payroll — a system supplemented by spreadsheets and paperwork — for a new structure based on software made by Workday to process state employee paychecks and benefits. While Workday makes the software platform, another state vendor, Accenture, helps the state to configure and run the system.

The ERP’s finance portion went live in July 2025, and its Human Capital Management and payroll modules followed in November 2025. 

The report admits there are still some kinks to be worked out, noting that “ERP is currently in hyper care support with implementation partner Accenture through March 2026.” The term “hyper care” is defined as the stabilization period for a software system after it rolls out. That means the vendor and state’s internal project team are supposed to closely watch bugs, train users and resolve problems that real users encounter. The report adds that a customer care call center was established for payroll-related questions. While the report does not cite recent incidents, the erroneous “State of Rhode Island Umbrella Company” paychecks that went out to state employees is one example state workers’ issue with the rollout.  

State employee unions demand accountability for paycheck errors amid new software rollout

The report noted the cyber incident involving RIBridges was resolved by Spring 2025. A factor which may have played a role in the breach was how the system handled incident logs. The state’s legacy security information and event management platform — which is a piece of software meant to aggregate varieties of logs and alerts  — was replaced with a more modern software called Splunk in 2025. The RIBridges system also upgraded its firewall and VPN.   

The system only saw 364 problem tickets submitted during 2025, and, despite the breach-related issues, RIBridges still managed to dispense $461 million in public benefits last year. RIBridges also received three new server racks in the state data center in 2025.

At a May 2025 Senate committee hearing, Tardiff expressed the desire for the agency to move away slightly from contractors and vendor labor. His agency still reported $154.16 million for total contract value in 2025, but it also negotiated about $5.32 million in savings from its vendors. 

Also included as an appendix in the report is a brief inventory of state government applications where the state says AI features are enabled. While the recommendations in a recent report by the state’s AI task force chose not to endorse any specific solutions or software, the IT department notes that it is “guiding Rhode Island state government through its considerations of open and closed AI systems, as well as the appropriate use-cases for AI deployments within the IT portfolio.” 

IT officials have started to inventory vendors’ capabilities for AI, and a working group within the agency is examining how AI can be brought into state government on a large scale. The agency expects some of these projects to begin around the end of the first quarter in 2026. 

As for the AI features currently listed as “turned on,” the report lists a DMV chatbot and a “Vendor Cannabis Seed-to- Sale Tracking System” for the Office of Cannabis Regulation.

Another appendix in the report containing active projects within the IT department mentions that tech officials are in the process of deploying Microsoft CoPilot Chat across executive agencies. CoPilot is a common enterprise AI offering based on OpenAI’s large language models, the same company and technology that power ChatGPT. The report says this project does not involve any additional costs.