The Colorado Office of Information Technology (OIT) has two different programs underway to provide better services to citizens by increasingly leveraging technology like automation, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, said a state agency official.
Julia Richman, deputy executive director for the Colorado OIT, explained during GovExec’s SLG Tech Summit on Nov. 1 that technology is an increasingly fundamental part of state and local government, and that the two programs are perfect examples of how to leverage technology to better serve Coloradans.
The Colorado Digital Government Strategic Plan – which Gov. Jared Polis introduced on Oct. 10 – is the state’s plan to modernize and increase access to online state services to provide the best constituent experience in the country.
“We don’t see this digital government strategic plan as leveraging novel technology to solve the next VR challenge of the future,” Richman said. “It’s about how do we make things better for constituents, how do we better manage all these internal mechanics” and deliver technology that leads to better digital government service, she said.
The plan has three key goals: connect all Coloradans; expand opportunity and reduce poverty; and make government easy.
Those goals are supported by six strategies:
- Ensure all Coloradans have access to high-speed internet;
- Design around the life experiences of Colorado residents;
- Use technology to improve services for residents;
- Harness data to improve the resident journey and outcomes;
- Cultivate analytics, business intelligence and product leadership in agencies; and
- Bring best in class tools and technologies to how state agencies work.
The Colorado OIT has another program already underway to help the agency reimagine IT – one of Gov. Polis’ objectives when he took office, Richman said.
“Gov. Polis outlined his vision of building increased agency IT accountability and ownership, collaborative IT governance and oversight, and a nimbler and process-oriented IT organization. Following his vision OIT began reimagining IT in state government and pursued a programmatic investment in change together with our state partners,” Richman said.
This led to the launch of the statewide IT Transformation (ITT) Program that promised to reimagine IT operations and service delivery, over two years ago. Since then, OIT has partnered with more than 200 agency stakeholders to complete 29 projects, with many more in the works.
As part of the ITT program, OIT launched the Implementing IT Asset Management project which provides a single modern solution for OIT and agencies to track hardware on the state network. With automated data collection, “manual processes are being reduced, making it easier for agencies to see the physical and software assets currently in use,” Richman said.
“Our team is now working to take the Service Catalog to the next level by automating it through our customer portal,” Richman said.
OIT also launched the IT Service Management (ITSM) Tool Suite, which implemented a leading-edge technology platform that lays the foundation for reimagined IT service design, delivery, support, and management to create a world-class customer experience.
The agency plans to continue building out the toolkit capabilities to provide a place where processes are automated, project visibility is improved, governance is enabled, the lifecycle of requests is tracked, and data can be used for sound financial IT planning.
