Larimer County partnered with Okta, a San Francisco-based tech firm that controls access management software, to standardize company logins across the county’s numerous and often incompatible programs.
Stay-at-home orders moved Colorado’s Larimer County, like every other municipality in the country, firmly into the digital domain. Connecting unconnected apps for a seamless user experience has emerged to be one of the most crucial hurdles Turnbull said his company has conquered in this digital venture.
“We were lucky (because) we already had apps that were up and running.”Gregg Turnbull, Director of Innovation and Insights, Latimer County’s Regional Government
The access management software makes the shift easier by allowing to bring many different applications online while sharing one identity. claiming county employees can use the same digital identity to securely access various cloud-based services via desktop, laptop and phone apps. According to a brief about the digital transformation, Turnbull and his team created a “central, secure way for thousands of employees and citizens to be authenticated while enabling their 28 departments (the sheriff’s office, parks office, vehicle licensing department, and so on) to go fully remote in a matter of weeks.”
Turnbull credits Okta’s single-identity capabilities with assisting county employees in adapting to quickly changing work conditions—remembering many digital identities may be difficult, especially for individuals unfamiliar with cloud-based services. According to a Microsoft brief published by Julia Glidden, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s worldwide public sector, this transition to remote work by public sector agencies was essential for city and county governments like Larimer County to retain their critical functions. “As some workers now begin to return to the office, governmental and educational institutions must adapt to a new, hybrid era,” the report says, more than a year after the pandemic began.
Remote and hybrid work are here to stay in both the corporate and public sectors. New issues have arisen as a result, the most essential of which being connectivity.
Larimer County is an excellent example of an area that has difficulty uniting its various constituents. With a population of roughly 300,000 people, Denver County is divided between urban, agricultural, and “really nice natural resource space,” according to Turnbull. “There will always be a difficulty in getting connectivity into rural areas,” because of the character of some parts of the county.
Turnbull emphasized the significance of being open to input and being ahead of the curve in this statement. Turnbull explained that change is frequently “driven by the residents.” “It’s a back-and-forth. It’s a dance.” Residents will come to us and ask why the county is unable to accomplish certain things. It is also our responsibility to consider “how can we meet their needs?”
“We’re still doing the services we did 100 years ago, looking out for residents, making sure land is tracked within the county,” Turnbull said, despite the fact that technology has advanced dramatically.
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