Neal-Graves will officially step away from the Office of Information Technology Dec. 1, handing the reins to former Denver CIO David Edinger, who started with the agency today.
Neal-Graves has been serving in the role since October 2020, but has been with the state for seven years. He said he is most proud of cultivating cultural change within OIT, rather than a single project or program. The people, he noted, are what sets the organization apart from the private sector, where he worked for roughly 40 years.
“If you can make a good business case for what you're trying to do and how it's going to make government service better, people will listen to you,” he said. “And you just have to be able to figure out how to speak in those terms.”
Those terms, as he defined them, are not specifically about making money, but rather making the business case that technologies can change how government delivers services to people, making service delivery more efficient and achieving measurable outcomes.
Another way that his private-sector experience shaped his perspective was the focus on the customer. For government services, this comes in the way of making it easier for people to use and access government services — not unlike how they would access private services.
“I think part of making it easier for people to interface with government is making it very familiar,” he said, underlining the importance of a single interface and single sign-on.
But this has hardly been a natural evolution, he said, and part of the shift to digitize more government services was brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, when Neal-Graves started with the state as CIO, it was during the height of the pandemic’s impact, testing his ability to make drastic transformations quickly.
In the short term, he said that the challenge was getting thousands of state employees enabled to securely work remote. In the longer term, it was sustaining engagement among staff.
While this need to shift to remote work was initially a puzzle that the state had to solve, Neal-Graves also saw it as an opportunity. When Gov. Jared Polis granted state agencies the choice to decide whether to keep working remotely or bring employees back to the office, OIT opted to retain its remote workplace, which he believes has helped opened the talent pool across the state.
To help shape culture in the era of remote work, OIT is working to create a “destination office” for events or meetings that can be used as an in-person workspace if necessary.
During his time with Colorado, he has seen several trends that he expects to continue to advance in progress, such as the use of the software-as-a-service model and artificial intelligence.
As he noted, artificial intelligence in some capacity is already in use at the state level, but, looking forward, he expects the technology to continue to evolve, enabling the state to continually improve services.
Neal-Graves believes that OIT has a bright future, underlining several initiatives that are underway. This includes the retiring of technical debt, as well as major funding opportunities becoming available for state broadband expansion.
“But the thing that I'm most excited about is the opportunity around digital government,” he said, underlining the progress made with the MyColorado app. In spite of this progress, he said, the state has only scratched the surface.
