Under the leadership of Suma Nallapati, Denver is making bold strides toward becoming one of the most innovative and effective city governments in the United States. Nallapati is CIO at Denver Technology Services (DTS), the central information technology department for the City and County of Denver. Founded by executive order in 2005, DTS supports over 50 unique city agencies with a team of more than 300 employees.
This department oversees all aspects of technology for the city — from hardware and software to infrastructure, applications, digital experience, and policy. The work DTS does impacts the way every other agency functions and, ultimately, how Denver’s residents are served. But like many government organizations, DTS faced challenges with outdated legacy systems that limited its ability to ensure accurate record-keeping for things like public records and police reports, while also governing content effectively.
By adopting Box, DTS was able to take advantage of the capabilities of Intelligent Content Management — not just smarter content management and collaboration but a way to innovate with AI capabilities and stay within their budget.
Overcoming legacy challenges with Box
Across numerous departments, the City and County of Denver stores records that relate to audits, inspections, contracts, and projects. These records come with varying retention policies, but the legacy record management tool wasn’t flexible enough to customize the storage policies for each type.
This conundrum had the potential to open DTS up to compliance challenges. The existing tool didn’t have the sensitive data protection DTS needed, not to mention the outages and storage issues when trying to store and access records. It came time to look for a better solution, which is when DTS chose Box.
Box serves two critical use cases for DTS: internally as a centralized record repository and externally for sharing large files and collaborating securely with partners. Now, DTS can set retention policies for each document or record type and monitor sensitive data across and even external to departments. This shift has helped modernize workflows while improving governance around sensitive data.
Within just one month of rolling out Box at DTS, user adoption quadrupled compared to the previous content platform — a testament to how well Box meets diverse agency needs across departments and its ease of use across a range of robust use cases. Over a thousand city staff actively use Box, including teams from the chief attorney’s office, parks and recreation, public safety, community planning development, transportation infrastructure, and other agencies.
As just one example, the city attorney’s office uses Box for case work and is able to share files externally securely and with ease. Such widespread usage reflects not only trust but also the tangible productivity gains enabled by Intelligent Content Management powered by Box Enterprise Advanced — streamlined file sharing, real-time collaboration, automated workflows, enhanced security protocols, and more.
Nallapati says, “We’re thrilled with the high user acceptance and how it’s helping serve data protection for the city. What we want from technology is adoption, embracing technology productivity gains throughout.”
Embracing AI as an essential tool
Box enables far more than just content collaboration and governance. Nallapati emphasizes a broad, ambitious vision for AI: “Our approach for the city has been to look at holistic advancement, embracing the tools that can create and enhance workflows to meet the solutions of the operation — business needs rather than one-off things.”
In this context, she notes that “Box has been very helpful” in enabling advancements through tools that integrate seamlessly into existing processes while unlocking new efficiencies powered by AI capabilities. One early success story: developing a chatbot platform integrated deeply with backend apps including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and MuleSoft. The chatbot, named “Sunny,” helps residents answer questions about city services in many different languages. This project earned DTS recognition via a CIO 100 award for innovation.
In September 2024, DTS hosted their first-ever AI summit, inviting public participation in solving public sector challenges alongside tech luminaries including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn Co-Founder) and Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO). Reflecting on this event, Nallapati says: “The rich dialog that happened at that meeting was quite impactful... we are now starting to integrate AI capabilities within our technology footprint.”
Metadata drives smarter governance
Looking ahead, Nallapati is excited about working closely with Box on emerging topics like dynamic document generation, AI extraction from images, and metadata management. Her team initially imported content metadata from their previous platform, updating templates over time based on evolving requirements. The metadata coming out of that tool was very disordered. There was little consistency in the types of fields and what was added to the files as metadata. In the past, this confusion had contributed quite a bit of manual effort, inconsistency, and compliance and governance risks. But with Box, DTS now has the opportunity to continue enhancing how and where metadata can be used for governance and automation. According to Nallapati: “We apply retention policies based on the metadata templates that we create, and we also have to review the permission access and agency ownership of records.”
Accurate metadata drives key efforts and fuels productivity, including content access, security, and governance. DTS’s comprehensive approach to metadata ensures consistent enforcement of governance standards while supporting flexible, secure collaboration throughout city government operations.
Enhancing AI-powered automation
The Intelligent Content Management journey DTS has been on illustrates how thoughtful integration of cloud platforms, combined with strategic use of AI, can transform complex municipal operations, making them more agile, efficient, secure, and responsive to resident needs. The people of Denver City and County are the ones who ultimately benefit from technology. Civic services delivered smoothly every hour of every day, without friction, is the real proof point.
To learn more about Intelligent Content Management and AI-powered automation for government agencies, and hear the DTS story straight from Nallapati, watch AI-powered automation: enhancing efficiency and reducing workloads.
