The City and County of Denver has used Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to systematically automate routine IT and business processes across its 56 government agencies.

Over the last several years, Denver has automated 223 processes, which has led to:

• $4.06 million in financial savings over 20 months – averaging about $7,500 per day.
• 80,993 work hours refocused – including 53,208 IT staff hours and 27,785 non-IT staff hours.

These savings come from automating tasks such as:

• Provisioning and scaling infrastructure to support remote work.
• Automating licensing workflows in the Excise and Licensing Department (for example, identifying and routing new Airbnb and Vrbo rental records to inspectors).
• Streamlining document creation and reservation processes in departments like Community Planning and Denver Community Media.

By shifting repetitive, transactional work to automation, Denver’s teams can focus more on higher-value, citizen-facing activities while staying within tight budget constraints.

Automation has helped Denver reimagine how it delivers services to more than 700,000 residents, making interactions faster, more consistent, and easier to manage.

Some concrete examples include:

• Faster access to media services: Denver Community Media’s studio reservations (for podcasts, YouTube content, and Channel 8 broadcasts) used to take up to 3 days and required manual checks across multiple apps. With automation, the process is now fully digital and citizens receive an almost immediate response.
• More reliable community programs: The annual Snow Angel program, which matches volunteers with residents needing help shoveling snow, moved from a manual spreadsheet to an automated matching process. This reduces duplicate assignments and helps ensure more requests are fulfilled.
• Improved licensing experiences: Residential rental licensing, including short-term rentals like Airbnb and Vrbo, is now largely automated—from identifying new rental records to assigning inspections—reducing delays and manual follow-up.

Behind the scenes, these improvements also support Denver’s service level agreements (SLAs) and help the city maintain resident-centric, responsive digital experiences without adding significant headcount.

Denver treated automation as a strategic capability rather than a one-off project, putting several foundations in place to scale it across the organization.

Key elements of their approach include:

• Automation Center of Excellence (CoE): Established in 2021, the CoE manages intake for new automation ideas, tracks benefits, and shares results with business stakeholders.
• Prioritization and ROI tools: The team built a proprietary scoring system, an ROI calculator, and dashboards to decide which automation opportunities to tackle first and to quantify impact (such as the $4.06 million saved and 80,993 hours refocused).
• Regular governance: Monthly steering committee meetings review the backlog, align with agency needs, and identify “quick wins” where automation can be reused or replicated.
• Platform and expertise: Denver runs Ansible Automation Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and uses Red Hat Satellite for patch management. A dedicated Red Hat Technical Account Manager helped the city establish best practices and get more value from the platform.
• Security and resiliency focus: The automation team partners closely with IT security, using Ansible playbooks for tasks like automatic password resets when credentials appear on compromised lists, and integrating criminal justice information without adding new systems.

This structured approach allows Denver to continuously expand automation into new areas—such as planned server build automation—while keeping risk in check and ensuring that “computers can be transactional so humans can be transformative.”