STATETECH: Can you elaborate on that effort?
MCDANIEL: Through our human-centered design program, we were able to work with Jill Fraser, our CISO, and pull in partners from across the state, whether they were federal partners and other local governments. We came together to build a plan to figure out how the state of Colorado could bring cybersecurity resources to under-resourced organizations.
How can we as state of Colorado information security professionals come together to support others in incident response? How can we also achieve economies of scale as a state of Colorado group of information security professionals to reduce the cost needed to procure the technologies needed to secure our systems? This is an ongoing effort still. The state Office of Information Technology has been working with this group to submit grants and form consortia to support this whole-of-state effort.
LEARN ABOUT: How Coral Gables, Fla., CIO Raimundo Rodulfo is implementing smart city initiatives.
STATETECH: What are you particularly proud of achieving so far in digital transformation?
MCDANIEL: Our Unified Cellular Services Program. At the county level, procurement is a challenge in the sense that when there are similar services needed across the county, you don’t necessarily get a unified purchasing effort across departments due to various challenges. We were using cellular service for various needs, whether it was the sheriff’s office and its patrol vehicles or actual phones in the hands of caseworkers calling their clients.
We did extensive evaluations with some routers from Cradlepoint. We worked with partners like Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation and study of who could provide the best services to the county that would also provide value. We had routers and fleet trucks and patrol vehicles pinging cell towers over the course of the month to aggregate and collect data on the persistence of service, level of service and connectivity in the county.
The county is relatively large compared to our counterparts. We’ve got about 770 square miles of territory to cover next to neighboring Denver, all the way out to the mountains and south toward Colorado Springs. That effort took about two years to collect the data we needed to make informed decisions that weren’t in conflict with public safety and degradation potentially, or public service. So, we were able to unify county services under one purchasing contract agreement with T-Mobile. That saved the county $2.1 or $2.2 million.