Shawn Nailor will stay on as secretary and chief information officer of the Vermont Agency of Digital Services, Gov. Phil Scott’s office announced Friday, and Denise Reilly-Hughes has been named Deputy Secretary.
Nailor has held the post on an interim basis since September when his predecessor, John Quinn, departed for a private sector job. Both appointments are effective immediately.
“Both Shawn and Denise bring a high level of expertise to their new roles at ADS,” Scott said in a statement. “Their decades of work in the area of information technology and cybersecurity will help us continue our efforts to modernize how we deliver services to Vermonters.”
Nailor comes to the cabinet post after 34 years working for the state. According to the governor’s office, he got his start doing engineering work for the Agency of Transportation, where, in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene, he led the team that developed and maintained the crisis reporting map that provided first responders and the public with information about open roads.
Scott created the digital services agency upon first taking office in 2017 in an effort to consolidate IT services and contracting across state government, and Nailor was brought on as deputy secretary in August of that year.
“It is a tremendous privilege to continue to serve Vermonters as the secretary of the Agency of Digital Services,” Nailor said in a statement. “I have admired the work of this administration from the beginning, and I am honored to be a member of the great Cabinet the Governor has assembled.”
Reilly-Hughes comes to ADS after two decades in the private sector, where she most recently worked at MTX for six months in 2022, according to her LinkedIn profile. The Texas-based tech company recently made headlines for quietly pulling the plug on plans to bring 250 jobs to Vermont after being approved for a $6.3 million state incentive.
Reilly-Hughes arrived at the company after its application for the economic incentive had been submitted and played “no role” in it, Scott’s press secretary Jason Maulucci wrote in an email.
Prior to MTX, she spent over seven years at Microsoft, which is responsible for the state’s email platform, collaboration tools like Teams, productivity tools like Word and Excel, and the cloud hosting of some servers.
Scott’s office called her “a key partner with Vermont as it transitioned its modern workplace environment to the cloud,” and said she had a decade of experience working with state governments in New England. She worked at PC Connection Services, a New Hampshire IT company, for 12 years before that.
“I am honored to have this opportunity to serve Vermonters with the support of the great team at ADS,” Reilly-Hughes said in a statement. “I look forward to working together with our partners in state government to deliver simple and intuitive technology solutions that improve the lives of the citizens of Vermont.”