Did you know that 15 years ago OIT became what it is today?
When OIT was created in 1999 as the Governor’s Office of Innovation and Technology (and later renamed the Governor’s Office of Information Technology in July 2006) to serve as an advisory organization, executive branch agencies managed their own IT services. The result included duplicative systems and the inability to leverage statewide procurement opportunities, among other things.
With the overwhelmingly bipartisan passage of Senate Bill 08-155 (“the consolidation bill”), IT functions, systems, personnel and assets from nearly all agencies were consolidated into a single entity—OIT. A lot has changed since July 1, 2008, when OIT went from a single office of less than a dozen staff to nearly 1,000 employees in locations across the entire state. Here are five numbers that tell part of our story since consolidation 15 years ago:
- Prior to consolidation, there were 15 on-premises email platforms spread across 50 servers. We now have one enterprise solution (Google Workspace) that provides email and calendaring services, as well as tools that make it easy for state employees to collaborate.
- Back then, we had 16 different service desk phone numbers; now, we have one easy-to-remember enterprise number.
- In 2017, our now CIO & Executive Director Anthony Neal-Graves was brought out of retirement to lead the Colorado Broadband Office. At that time, only 59% of rural households had access to basic broadband—defined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as 25 Mbps upload and 3 Mbps download. That number is now up to nearly 92% as we continue to work toward 100%.
- Launched in 2019, the number of myColorado™—the State of Colorado’s Official Mobile App™—users has grown to over 1.2 million. The app is a great example of how we collaborate with state agencies to bring state services to the palms of Coloradans’ hands.
- We’re coming up on three years of reimagining IT services alongside our agency partners through the IT Transformation Program. In that time, we’ve completed 37 projects, with six more in progress, on the way to transforming statewide IT operations and service delivery with ever-expanding access to secure, digital government services for all Coloradans.