The State of Colorado Office of IT works to empower the state with flexible technology that will drive sustainable and intelligent business decisions. However, with 17 different state agencies acting as independent IT shops, there was a lot of product repetition, process inefficiency, and difficulties in collaboration across agencies. Working together required extensive firewall and infrastructure maneuvering. In 2008, the Governor issued a mandate requiring a consolidation of the state’s agencies into one overarching IT department. One of the goals for the newly created agency was creating a unified directory from all of the independent directories. This session will talk about how a federated identity and directory service was used to meet this requirement. As a result of doing this, all of the CO state agencies are able to collaborate cohesively together as one, which in turn decreased redundant tasks, increased productivity, strengthened overall security and created efficiencies all around so that now synergies are actually realized. (Ryan Curtice, Kevin Williams, Sponsored)