Collaboration guides state’s blueprint for transformation
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Colorado’s Office of Technology works closely with agency partners, weighing in their needs to shape IT projects that improve operations.
Colorado’s Office of Information Technology has learned the value of laying a strong foundation before building digital solutions.
OIT Deputy Executive Director Julia Richman, who oversees the administrative operations, said her office collaborated with agency partners to launch the IT Transformation program that empowers agencies’ IT decisions.
Launched in 2020, the ITT program aims to help agencies deliver on their business strategies through high-impact technology, standardize OIT’s service offerings and processes and foster greater collaboration with customers, according to a report on the program released in August.
“I’m somebody who believes that collaboration is really at the root of problem solving because we cannot assume what our customers need and want.… Our agency had gotten into the habit of asking permission to deliver the services we were established to create rather than saying, ‘Here are the services we’re providing, how are they going?’” Richman said at the GCN-Route 50 Tech Summit.
More than 200 agency partners have been involved with ITT, which has delivered 29 IT projects to date, focusing on five goals:
- Establish IT governance by creating a framework for strategic planning for OIT and stakeholders that want to pursue new IT or technology solutions.
- Increase financial transparency by digitizing billing and asset management.
- Build up IT workforce skills and capabilities by conducting performance analyses and introducing online training.
- Digitize government services and provide state workers with tools and resources to work quickly and decisively.
- Modernize end-to-end service delivery, improve product and service management and strengthen internal communication to bolster state partnerships and increase customer satisfaction.
Richman highlighted the program’s real-time billing model as one way the state reimagined its IT operations. The billing site now provides more accurate, timely invoices and increases agencies’ ability to control the IT costs to support their programs.
“Customers have much more accountability and transparency into their IT [spending] and can take action because they know what they’re buying,” she said.
The ITT program provides “a comprehensive framework for shoring up our organization’s mission, financial model, how we make decisions, how we partner with customers, services we offer and the technologies that support them,” Richman said.
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