Denver turned to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to rethink how IT and operational work gets done across its 56 government agencies. The goal was to protect resident services while dealing with tight and often shrinking budgets.

By automating 223 processes over the last five years, the City and County of Denver has:

• Saved $4.06 million in 20 months – equivalent to about $7,500 every day.
• Refocused 80,993 work hours from manual tasks to higher-value, citizen-focused work.
• Improved resiliency and reduced workload for IT and business teams.

Examples include:

• Residential rental licensing: Ansible now automatically identifies new rental records (including Airbnb and Vrbo), checks they meet criteria, and assigns them to inspectors. This reduces manual effort and helps ensure every rental property is identified and licensed.
• Studio reservations at Denver Community Media: A process that used to take up to three days and multiple apps is now fully automated, giving citizens near-instant responses for podcast, YouTube, or TV studio bookings.
• Weekly document creation: Automating PDF creation for the Community Planning and Building Department freed up an entire team’s Friday afternoons, which previously were spent on manual document work.

Under the hood, Denver runs everything on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, uses Red Hat Satellite for patch management, and collaborates closely with a Red Hat Technical Account Manager to establish best practices and maximize ROI. An Automation Center of Excellence, launched in 2021, manages intake, prioritization, and measurement of automation projects using a proprietary scoring system, ROI calculator, and dashboards.

The net effect: automation helps Denver stay within budget while reshaping how staff spend their time, so more effort goes into resident-centric, responsive digital services rather than repetitive tasks.

Automation has had a direct, measurable impact on how Denver’s employees and IT teams work.

Across the organization, the City has refocused 80,993 work hours thanks to Ansible Automation Platform. That breaks down into:

• 53,208 IT staff hours saved
• 27,785 non-IT staff hours saved

Those hours have been redirected from repetitive, manual work to more meaningful, citizen-focused activities, which also supports higher job satisfaction.

Specific examples include:

• Security operations: The automation team created Ansible playbooks that respond to alerts from CrowdStrike when a user’s password appears on a compromised list. Ansible automatically forces a password change, significantly reducing the time the information security team spends on routine resets.
• Criminal justice data integration: Denver is using Ansible Automation Platform to integrate criminal justice information for the Denver Police Department. This avoids the cost and complexity of an additional system and helps maintain data integrity within the existing ecosystem.
• Weekly admin work: In the Community Planning and Building Department, automating the creation and completion of PDF documents freed up an entire team’s four hours every Friday, which they can now use for higher-value planning and citizen support.

From an IT operations perspective, Denver’s automation team also benefits from:

• A unified automation platform that scales across domains, which was critical when supporting more than 15,000 employees working from home and a 514% increase in Microsoft Teams usage during the pandemic.
• The ability to reuse code within Ansible Automation Platform, reducing duplication of effort and speeding up development of new automations, such as upcoming automated server builds.

Internally, the City summarizes its approach with the mantra: “Let computers be transactional so humans can be transformative.” Automation handles the routine work so staff can focus on higher-impact tasks.

Denver’s automation strategy is designed around resident outcomes as much as internal efficiency. By using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the City has been able to improve the quality, speed, and consistency of services that reach more than 700,000 residents.

Key resident-facing improvements include:

• Faster, more reliable digital experiences: Automation supports scalable, resilient IT operations across 56 agencies, from policing and public works to animal shelters and waste services. This underpins the City’s goal of providing resident-centric, responsive digital experiences for both citizens and employees.
• Better handling of community programs: For the Denver Agency for Human Rights and Community Partnership’s annual Snow Angel program, Ansible now automatically matches volunteers with residents who request help shoveling snow. Previously, a manual spreadsheet led to duplicate visits for some addresses and missed requests for others. Automation helps ensure requests are matched more evenly so more residents get timely assistance.
• Improved licensing and compliance: In the Excise and Licensing Department, automation now identifies new rental records (including short-term rentals like Airbnb and Vrbo), checks eligibility, and assigns inspections. This not only saves time and money, but also helps ensure rental properties are properly identified and licensed, supporting safer housing conditions.
• Quicker access to media services: Citizens who want to record podcasts, YouTube content, or TV shows at Denver Community Media now receive near-immediate studio booking confirmations, instead of waiting up to three days for manual processing.

Behind these improvements is a structured automation program:

• An Automation Center of Excellence manages intake, prioritization, and measurement of automation projects.
• A proprietary scoring system, ROI calculator, and dashboards help the City choose projects that will have the most impact on service levels and resident experience.
• Regular steering committee meetings align IT, automation teams, and business stakeholders on where automation can deliver quick wins for the community.

Overall, automation helps Denver maintain and improve service levels and SLAs, even under budget pressure, by reimagining how work is done and ensuring staff can spend more time directly supporting residents.