How Does Colorado Win at the IT Recruiting Game?

Colorado CIO David Edinger has a key advantage over his peers in other states when it comes to workforce retention and recruiting: His team is mostly remote, provided workers live in Colorado. This has given Edinger an edge as his team works in areas like AI and unified logins.

1. What are your top priorities this year?

First is digital government. One of the pillars of Gov. Jared Polis’ agenda is to create a government that’s more efficient, sustainable and responsive. So we are focused on modern software processes, product management and user-centered design. We’ve also got a really cool analytics program that will provide unprecedented transparency and accountability. And we’re engaging the Colorado Digital Service (CDS) to look at seven agencies and reimagine the core digital services they deliver.

CDS is also helping with software procurement and vendor innovation. We have a major project where we are being disciplined about paying for components, and only paying when the component, module or milestone is reached successfully — holds vendors accountable in a way I traditionally have not seen in government. That will help with both delivery and cost.

The last thing is the myColorado app, which is evolving into a whole-of-government web experience. We just hit 1.7 million accounts. That creates a base for us to do the work we see in front of us over the next two years.

2. What are some generative AI use cases for Colorado?

We did a really interesting pilot over several months at the end of last year, and we learned a lot around accessibility and how much it can impact folks who have a disability with their work productivity. We have that rolling out across the state. I think 18 agencies and 1,500 users, of 31,000 total, are learning it.

What we’re seeing primarily is content generation and content summarization. It’s kind of funny, because users are generating content — and with all that content, they’re using AI to summarize that content. I think generally AI is being well received, but I can’t point to a single breakthrough where an agency is saying that it fundamentally changed their operations.

3. How are you approaching workforce?

We have a strategy of being remote where we can. That results in more than 80 percent of our employees being fully remote from anywhere in Colorado, which has been a tremendous recruiting tool. We’ve redesigned our office so it’s all collaboration space or directly serving the customer, like a tech bar where you can walk up and get your computer fixed. There’s very little office or hoteling space.

We can also recruit from anywhere in Colorado. That has been tremendous for bringing in people from other states as well as from within this state. It also speaks to resiliency, because a snowstorm doesn’t bring us down anymore.

We’re also focused on upskilling the workforce. Talent depreciation in government is huge. You can have systems that operate for decades, and then at some point, the talent that works on that tech, that’s all they know. So we invest intentionally in people and their skill sets, and also in leaders to manage a mostly remote environment, which is very different from when all 1,100 of us showed up at the office every day.

4. What challenges are you seeing in emerging tech?

Identity and access management experience. You can create many logins and disparate experiences. The other day I learned we have five different technology experiences in Colorado called CoCo, because it’s Co for Colorado and Co for Connection, so that’s a cute name. But they do totally different things — that gives you a sense of how we’re not really looking at this in a coherent, unified way, or from the customer’s perspective.

Another thing is when you think about mobile driver’s licenses and digital wallets, they’re geared from the big technology companies toward people who have one device per user. We have data that shows 16 percent of our users share a device. If we rely solely on those companies, we’re going to end up leaving that population behind, and because we’re the state, we have to serve everybody in Colorado. That will create some challenges for us, where we need to allow people to share a device and log in and out of myColorado.

This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Government Technology. Click here to view the full digital edition online.