At the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Annual Conference in Minneapolis this week, Julia Richman, Colorado’s deputy executive director for the Office of Information Technology, outlined the ways her state is working to bring its enterprise systems into 2023.
Tech debt, sometimes called innovation debt, refers to the cost of not improving systems, of relying on aging technologies that either are no longer the best tools for the job of serving residents or are so old that the staff who supported them have retired from government work.
Richman said they’ve made a lot of headway toward modernization this year, including consolidating data centers, moving off a 35-year-old mainframe and securing $100 million from the Legislature to go toward reducing tech debt.
She said the work of transforming these big legacy platforms is difficult and not without expense, but it has demonstrated to the governor and Legislature the cost of not modernizing those systems when it comes to what is ultimately most important: keeping state IT systems running smoothly and securely, and delivering the services that Coloradans need.
