The State of Colorado, Office of Information Technology (OIT)

The State of Colorado is comprised of 22 different state agencies that employ over 33,000 individuals. The Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) serves the executive branch agencies by providing IT infrastructure, network services, telecommunication tools, cloud computing, application development and support, and provisioning services. The State of Colorado and OIT are tasked with supporting each agency’s mission and enable effective cross-functional IT solutions.  

Business Problem

The Colorado agencies were operating individually and as distinct entities with their email servers, email platforms, authentication systems, and corporate address books. This decentralized infrastructure created complexity with systems integration and communication, IT planning,  and budgeting across the agencies. OIT was looking for a cloud-based solution to enhance communication and collaboration across their agencies that would also provide cost savings and long term ROI. 

Tempus Nova Solution

Tempus Nova worked closely with OIT and agency stakeholders to identify their IT and business requirements, security and compliance requirements, and establish integration points between the state’s legacy systems and Google. Tempus Nova mapped the business processes with application functionality and designed a comprehensive change management strategy to prepare each user for the coming change to enable stakeholders to “walk the walk”.  We delivered training on each application with role-based training for executives, executive assistants, administrators and help desk staff.

Tempus Nova integrated individual agency directories with Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS) to enable the automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of users. GCDS also provided the state with access to a Global Address List (GAL) that represented all active employees throughout each agency. This allowed for seamless communication between each agency.  We migrated mail, calendar, and contact data for over 33,000 employees over three deployment phases targeting a distinct group of users. In addition, Tempus Nova also led compliance sessions that enabled state agencies to develop and agree upon shared policies throughout the organization.  

Result

The State of Colorado deployed G Suite statewide in 2012. In their reports for their State Legislature in 2014 and 2015, Colorado identified cost savings/cost avoidance of $2.4M in 2014 and $3M in 2015. In 2016, that jumped to $7.2M. In 2014, Colorado executed a statewide initiative to leverage Google Sites (public and private websites hosted by Google for collaboration) and Google Drive (electronic file synchronization and virtual storage in the cloud).  In 2015, the State deployed Google Mobile Device Management (MDM), Google Hangouts (video conferencing and screen sharing), and increased their use of Sites and Drive.  

To date, Tempus Nova continues to support CO OIT with its Google Cloud environment (test and production domains, Google Chrome, Jamboards, etc.), cloud initiatives and requirements, and with GCP application development services. The result of these Google platform initiatives has enabled the State of Colorado and much other public and private sector organizations to achieve a rolling return on investment beyond email. This provided a path to cost avoidance by eliminating the higher costs of non-Google solutions that performed similar functions.