Director of Strategic Communications and Public Information Officer (Transparency Posting).

About The Role

The Governor's Office of Information Technology is in the middle of a significant transformation — moving from a project-based operating model to a product-based one, organized around cross-functional teams accountable for outcomes rather than handoffs. This Director of Strategic Communications and Public Information Officer role helps to make that transformation legible and credible: to OIT staff living through it, to agency partners deciding whether to trust it, to oversight bodies who have questioned OIT's effectiveness, and to the technical talent we need to hire. The Director also leads OIT's media relations team — the front door for media and the steady hand when something goes wrong in public.

We're looking for someone who has run a communications function before and has real experience in strategic communication, crisis communications, and media relations. What matters most is whether you treat communications as a capability that makes everyone else's work land better — not a service desk taking orders, and not a gate every message has to clear.

Who You Are

• You're a strategic partner. You get pulled into conversations early — not because you insist on it, but because leaders have learned your read on a situation improves the outcome. You know the difference between a moment that needs your judgment and one that just needs good craft.
• You stay close to the work. You keep strong situational awareness across the organization — you're in demos and the meetings where teams share their work, and you hold a standing cadence with the executives you support and their seconds. You've built the connections to see around corners, so you can get ahead of what's coming instead of reacting to it.
• You still write. You lead a team and you coach managers, but you're the one drafting for the CIO when it matters. When a principal edits your draft, you and your team learn from it — the correction shapes how you approach the next one, and the one after that.
• You're an enabler. You want delivery pods and agency partners to feel like communications makes them stronger. You work in the open by default and hold little close. Success looks like more people across OIT communicating well, not like your team being the only ones allowed to.
• You have real media relations chops. You've handled a hostile reporter, and managed a crisis in real time. This isn't theoretical.
• You can operate in ambiguity. OIT is mid-transformation and this function is being reshaped to match. You're comfortable building while flying, and you don't need a settled org chart to start making good decisions.
• You translate. You take something technical, political, or half-formed and turn it into language that lands with the person in front of you — whether that's a cabinet member, a delivery engineer, or a reporter on deadline.
• You’re curious and question. You’re not afraid to ask hard questions, express concerns with people senior to you.

Responsibilities

Communications strategy and executive advisory

• Set communications strategy across staff, agency partner, oversight, media, and public audiences.
• Serve as senior communications advisor to the CIO and executive team — on judgment, not just execution.
• Draft and edit executive messaging, testimony language, and talking points.

Media relations oversight

• Lead PIOs. Oversee press inquiries, interview preparation, and releases.
• Guide crisis and issues communications, coordinating across OIT, partner agencies, and the Governor's Office during high-visibility incidents.

Enabling communications across OIT

• Establish delegated-authority standards and playbooks so teams can communicate independently within a clear framework.
• Build reusable visual and template standards so any team can produce accurate, readable material without routing through this office.
• Own the standard for how significant changes get communicated — who communicates what, to whom, and when.

Transformation and change communications

• Treat behavior change in two distinct audiences — staff living through the reset and agency partners deciding whether to trust it — as the function's core objective. The two run on separate timelines, carry different profiles of what each group stands to lose, and demand different trust dynamics.
• Partner with service lines on the governance, incentive, and behavioral conditions that determine whether change actually lands — not just how it's announced.

Communications grounded in the work

• Keep the communications team close enough to delivery that they can write about it accurately and without a briefing.
• Ground each communicator in OIT's strategy and operating model as working source material, and connect them to the service lines whose work they translate. Understanding the work is the precondition for communicating it.

Reporting on how the transformation is going

• Own how OIT reports on its leading indicators — internally and to agency partners. Publish the trend lines honestly, including when they're moving the wrong way, framed as learning rather than failure.
• Work with service lines on what the organization does in response, not only on how the result is communicated.

Agency and oversight relationships

• Maintain trust with agency partners as a standing objective, including a running account of agency concerns shared with leadership.
• Own working-level relationships with oversight and legislative staff, and prepare executives for engagement with legislators.

Employer Brand

• Develop an honest narrative about why skilled technologists choose public service, present in the channels where product managers, service designers, and engineers actually look.

Team leadership

• Lead, develop, and coach a small team including managers.
• Evolve team roles and workflows to match how OIT now delivers, rather than how it was previously structured.
• Actively engage in improving leadership skills, attitudes, and knowledge, especially as related to equity, diversity and inclusion. Attend training, development and group training on topics of inclusive leadership.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

Knowledge

• Media relations, issues management, and crisis protocol. The public-sector fundamentals: media relationships, spokesperson preparation, escalation protocol, and holding-statement discipline under time pressure.
• Statutory PIO obligations. Multi-agency coordination during high-visibility incidents.
• Government accessibility and plain-language obligations. ADA/WCAG accessibility standards and plain-language requirements — or demonstrated ability to acquire Colorado-specific requirements quickly.
• Product-model and modern delivery fluency. Understands the shift from project-based to product-based delivery: pod structure, iterative delivery, outcome-over-output measurement, and the change in how "done" is defined. Must be able to explain the operating model to a non-technical audience — a skeptical agency partner, a legislative staffer.
• Change management as a discipline distinct from communications. Knows that governance structures, incentives, and behavioral patterns — not message quality — determine whether change lands or stalls. Can diagnose why a well-communicated change failed and name the mechanism that was missing.
• What technical talent looks for, and where they look for it. Knows the channels and professional communities where product managers, service designers, and engineers find work, and what those candidates weigh against a private-sector offer — compensation gap, mission, autonomy, quality of the work. Knows what an honest public-sector value proposition sounds like to someone holding a competing offer.

Skills

• People leadership. Hires, coaches, and develops communicators, including managers. Delegates real ownership rather than reviewing everything.
• Translation across altitudes. Turns governance logic, technical progress, and policy context into language that lands separately for staff, agency partners, oversight bodies, and Coloradans. Translates the big picture into specific deliverables at the team and individual level.
• Designing delegated-authority frameworks. Writes the standards, playbooks, and rubrics that let teams communicate independently — defining what teams may do alone, what requires coordination, and what requires sign-off. Establishes new structures and operating rhythms while simultaneously servicing daily demand.
• Hands-on production at craft level. Personally drafts and edits under pressure: CIO testimony language, presentation decks, FAQs, the employer-brand narrative, executive correspondence. Writes as well as directs — production capacity is a working requirement.
• Communications measurement. Builds and maintains an audience map, conducts a current-state audit, and stands up a standing log of agency concerns. Tracks whether the message gap is closing and reports honestly, including when the picture is unflattering.
• Visual and information design standards. Produces reusable templates for project status, service health, delivery progress, and portfolio views — enabling any team to make accurate, readable visuals without routing through the comms team. An operational capability, explicitly not a branding exercise.
• Executive advisory and candor. Counsels the CIO and executive team on communications judgment — not just execution. Has the standing and the nerve to tell a senior leader their framing is wrong, their timing is bad, or the message won't land with the audience it's meant for, including when saying so is uncomfortable. Corrects sloppy framing in the room rather than cleaning it up afterward, and knows when a matter requires the CIO directly.

Abilities

• Influences and holds standards without positional authority. Gets service-line executives — including people senior to this role — to adopt shared communications standards and escalation thresholds, with no line authority over them. Escalates when enforcement is required rather than absorbing the conflict or abandoning the standard.
• Exercises sound judgment with sensitive and high-stakes information. Operates credibly across agencies, the Governor's Office, media, and the public.
• Constructs and stewards the oversight narrative. Reads audit findings, hearing records, and agency complaints with enough literacy to understand what failed — and can explain how the new operating model fixes it, what evidence will prove it, and what OIT needs from the Legislature to make it work. Prepares executives for engagement with legislators while owning working-level relationships with oversight and legislative staff. Flags where the narrative is thin.