In issues, Colorado’s new digital services director sees ‘opportunities for innovation’

It’s been a little over a month since Colorado announced Sarah Tuneberg to lead the state’s digital service office. In that time, she said, she’s identified several issues with how the state delivers services that she considers “opportunities for innovation.”

Created in 2019 within the Governor’s Office of Information Technology, the Colorado Digital Service team is one of several in-house digital services teams that have popped up in state governments over the past several years, charged with improving state websites, online service delivery and user experience. These teams are often tasked with fixing the issues of huge state systems that touch multiple state agencies.

The Colorado Sun last month reported on the state having some of the slowest processing times for benefits applications in the country, in some cases leading to families missing months of benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Tuneberg said the issues are on her radar, and that SNAP timeliness is an essential part of digital service delivery. She said the issues provide her team the opportunity to partner with the Colorado Department of Human Services, which is “trying to close that gap as fast as possible through process changes, through funding changes, through policy change.”

“My team is really good at user experience and user journey mapping, like that’s where we are excellent. And so we have a unique opportunity — and we are executing on a unique opportunity — to partner with the SNAP delivery teams, both at the state and the county level, to understand what’s the workflow, what are the problems,” Tuneberg said. “We have a unique opportunity to augment [CDHS’s work] with technology improvements. I’m super excited to partner with them, and I think there’s huge opportunity.”

She said the digital services team partnered with the human services department to draft a job description for a head of product to oversee the benefits system, which the state is currently hiring for.

This new role, which she said requires focused effort and applying product expertise, builds well on her previous public sector experience. Before she accepted the job with Colorado’s Digital Service — and in addition to building three startups — Tuneberg served as the state’s COVID-19 lead. In that role, she led a team of 450 staff members who in 2020 expanded testing capacity to more than 50,000 per day, built a contact tracing program that the state claims saved taxpayers $30 million and helped purchase new technologies.

“Originally, I was the head of the innovation response team, which was this sort of new and interesting idea about how to respond to COVID that Gov. [Jared] Polis had in partnership with others, and then that grew into a larger role and my portfolio included testing, all of containment and the technology that enabled those functions of our COVID-19 response,” Tuneberg said.

Also in this role, Tuneberg said she was the first agency partner with the Colorado Digital Service, which had launched just one year prior to the start of the pandemic. She said this experience was part of the reason she jumped at the new job.

“I had the experience of working with CDS as the client, as the customer, and was just blown away by the incredible skill of people working at the real top of their practice area, really invested in delivering the best outcomes for users especially in this time of intense crisis,” Tuneberg continued. “The universe aligned that Matthew [McMcAllister] was leaving and I was ready for a new role. And I was like, ‘Heck, yeah, I would love to work with those people. What an amazing opportunity.'”

McAllister left in July after leading the office for nearly three years.

When asked if there was anything that surprised her when stepping into the role with the Colorado Digital Service, Tuneberg said she was surprised about “how big the larger digital services universe was,” and that for the most part, states are grappling with the same problems.

She said in Colorado, state agency leaders are also dealing with the same issues, even if their core functions are entirely different. She will be leading her team to partner with the agencies to help them work through these problems with a focus on user experience, strategy, data governance and innovation.

“Executive directors across Colorado have similar technology challenges or opportunities for innovation, and lots of them are around data. It’s sort of data governance, it’s identity, and it’s yielding a really powerful user experience for the person who’s interacting with the website, the service,” Tuneberg said. “It is really powerful, I think, especially for Coloradans, because it allows for alignment of technology solutions. It allows for sort of opportunities of scale. We don’t have to solve it just one agency. We can solve it government wide and really be delivering for Coloradans.”