Offering Digital Government Experience for Residents

Craig Poley, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at City of Arvada

Craig Poley, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at City of Arvada

With more than 15 years of repeated success, Craig Poley has been leading teams and initiatives with internal and external resources. He is a visionary, sought-after leader who also directs operational areas beyond tech positions and has unique blend of executive competencies including strategic IT planning, operational requirements, and continuous improvement. He is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at City of Arvada and has expertise in key areas such as data governance, IT Governance, disaster recovery, IT strategic planning.

How has the government sector evolved in the past few years?

The pandemic was a blessing in disguise for the impact it had in IT and digital governments because the pandemic forced us to think more creatively and innovatively. In this new environment, we have to protect and rethink how we digitize paper and manual government processes. If we aren't trying to digitize every paper process,then it would be a shame after coming into this age of digitization. Hence in a sentence it can be summarized that a lot of governments at all levels, whether it's town, city, county or state are trying to create a progressive digital government experience for their residents.

Is there any latest project that you have been working on and what are the technological and process elements that you leverage to make the process successful?

We have been focusing on three things. The first is cybersecurity because in this new digital world, cybersecurity is crucial. Secondly, we're shifting from a traditional web content management platform to a new digital experience platform which has allowed us to have a better control of content messaging and notifications for residents.

“We want to be able to relate and commingle data from different assets and systems so that we can really start to make better data driven decisions, and we can really start to drive our city forward using all these different datasets and AI capabilities”.

Finally, in order to truly begin making better decisions and to begin advancing our city using all these various datasets, we are driving to integrate data from various assets and systems and looking into how we can include AI responsibly to further improve our impact for residents.

What are the technological trends that excite you for the future of government sector?

The technological trends are data and analytics, as well as AI. For example, we’ve recently organized the first Data and Analytics team at the City of Arvada to become even more forward thinking with data. We have to decide what we want to be when it comes to data utilization. We are experts at collecting data, not experts at capitalizing on that data for our team’s and residents’ benefit. We are working to change that.

Modern integrations such as integration platforms as a service, allow us to transfer structured and unstructured data around a bit more readily, combine it simply, and discover relationships between those datasets.I think that in the future, as integrations become more tightly coupled and become easier to pull off, we are really going to begin to grow in that area.

Would you like to share a piece of advice for the fellow peers to improve in the space?

There has been a generation of government technology leaders that were very conservative. We are seeing a new willingness to take risks. But before taking risk, we have to measure it. But don't be afraid to break the status quo and to try new things, measure them, and consider the outcomes--and keep in mind that failure is still progress. My final piece of advice would be for leaders to step out of their comfort zone. We have a big opportunity in front of us.