Clark County CIO Reveals Tech Roadmap Centred on Residents

As local governments nationwide struggle with outdated systems and rising resident expectations, Clark County, Nevada is overhauling its approach to public services through technology. 

The challenges are substantial: siloed departments, legacy infrastructure, multilingual constituencies and the mounting pressure to deliver high-quality digital experiences with government-level budgets and security requirements.

Home to 2.3 million residents across 8,000 square miles – equivalent in size to the State of New Jersey – this jurisdiction encompasses the Las Vegas metropolitan area and represents the majority of Nevada’s population. With 42 million tourists visiting annually, the county’s technology infrastructure must serve both permanent residents and a continuous influx of visitors.

Bob Leek, Chief Information Officer at Clark County, brings experience from his previous role as CIO for Multnomah County in Oregon and technology leadership positions at Kaiser Permanente. Today, he manages a team of over 200 staff organised across four divisions: infrastructure, security, applications and digital services.

“I put on my profile that my tagline is ‘leveraging people, technology and process for better outcomes,’” Bob explains. His department operates a federated IT model that balances centralised infrastructure with department-specific technology teams to address what he describes as “insatiable demand for technology services” across 40 departments.

The county’s service model includes a distinctive characteristic: 1.1 million residents live in unincorporated areas, requiring the county to provide municipal-level services alongside traditional county functions. 

“If you’re on the north side of Sahara Avenue, you’re in the city of Las Vegas. If you’re on the south side of Sahara Avenue, you're in Clark County,” Bob notes.

Clark County technology strategy focuses on resident-centred digital services

The foundation of the county’s approach is a three-year strategic plan built around three core pillars, which Bob emphasises is a county-wide technology strategy rather than simply an IT department initiative.

The first pillar centres on public-facing presence, encompassing the county website, mobile applications and in-person experiences. This balanced approach acknowledges that, while digital alternatives are increasingly important, traditional in-person services remain necessary for many residents. 

“People can still come into our office and pay their property taxes in person, if for whatever reason, they feel that is the best method by which to interact with us. But we also provide digital alternatives,” Bob explains.

The second pillar focuses on enabling departments to utilise technology effectively, incorporating data-driven decision making and emerging technologies such as AI. The third pillar aims to create “a great place to work” through investments in remote work capabilities, digital skills development and training programmes.

“Those serve as our three main pillars: public focus, the department's capabilities, and then having a great place to work. That forms the core of our technology strategy from a county perspective,” Bob says.

Clark County AI implementation enhances translation services and document processing

Clark County has adopted an approach to AI that Bob characterises as “augmented intelligence”. These technologies, he explains, are designed to help the county perform its functions better – whether that means more cost-effectively, productively or accurately – while removing friction and improving the ease of doing business with the county.

The county has instituted an AI policy aligned with federal and state guidelines to ensure responsible use. Bob emphasises Clark County’s commitment to using AI for good, while maintaining transparency by clearly citing sources and references and being explicit about where AI has been applied in their processes.

With over two dozen AI pilots already underway, translation services have emerged as a priority application, addressing the county’s diverse population. Bob explains: “For a predominance of people that we deal with, English is a second language. The desire on our part is to meet people where they are and to not introduce confusion or misunderstanding in these very important transactions.” 

Real-time translation capabilities are being implemented for in-person interactions and public meetings. “We are going to pilot and bring to life those technologies for both person-to-person interaction,” says Bob. “The Board can conduct their business in English. But in real time one can sit in the audience with their device and choose the language they want to read and hear the board deliberations in.”

Document processing represents another key AI application, with the state mandating service provision in English, Spanish and Tagalog. The county is also developing a digital assistant for its website using large language models, while the county’s developers are also utilising AI assistance for code generation. 

“When you ask a code-generating bot to help you write code, you’re going to get better code,” says Bob. “You’re going to get things that are accounted for like security models and variable declarations, and all the things that programmers know that they need to do.”

Delivering secure voting systems

As part of its broader technology strategy, Clark County has implemented comprehensive upgrades to its election infrastructure, supporting both mail-in ballots and in-person voting across a network of approximately 130 polling sites throughout the county. For Bob and his team, security and voter confidence remain paramount concerns throughout this modernisation process.

“We want to make sure that they’re secure,” Bob says, pointing to the careful attention paid to every aspect of the voting experience. His team has designed systems ensuring that all activities within polling locations meet strict standards for “privacy and security, and that people leave with a high sense of confidence in the integrity of the entire process.”

The technological transformation has been deliberate and methodical. Moving away from potentially vulnerable older systems, the county has transitioned from laptop-based voting technology to a more secure tablet-based platform. These specialised devices operate on encrypted communications within a private network dedicated exclusively to election use.

“We replaced USB sticks and laptops with a secure communication link through tablets,” Bob explains. “Those tablets only do one thing, and that’s to facilitate the election cycle.”

This measured approach to technology adoption reflects the county’s broader philosophy when implementing critical systems. Rather than rushing to adopt untested solutions, Clark County takes a more measured approach. 

“We're not on the bleeding edge of technology – we’re a close follower, and we deploy and implement solutions that have been proven elsewhere first,” Bob says.

Looking beyond its own boundaries, the county is leveraging its successful implementations to benefit the entire state. In collaboration with Nevada’s Secretary of State, Clark County is helping develop a unified statewide voter registration and election management system. This partnership represents a natural evolution of their successful local implementations.

“We’re confident that we can extend what we have built here in Clark County to be statewide,” Bob adds, “and we’re working closely with the Secretary of State’s office on that.”

Partnerships deliver strategic technology solutions

Clark County has fundamentally transformed its approach to technology vendor relationships, moving from a fragmented vendor landscape to a carefully curated partnership model. This strategic shift was driven by the need for deeper, more collaborative vendor relationships that could support the county’s long-term technology vision.

“We felt like reducing to a small number of very strategic partners would be beneficial to us,” Bob explains. Rather than maintaining numerous superficial vendor relationships, the county sought to “narrow the list of organisations that we work with to a set of key partners” with whom they could share their technology roadmaps and then collaboratively develop solution pathways.

Instead of passively responding to vendor offerings, Clark County now drives the conversation based on its strategic priorities. “We don't want to just chase the vendor community,” Bob notes. “The solution providers are constantly innovating, and there are new features and new capabilities. And AI is accelerating a lot of that.”

To implement this partnership strategy, the county developed a comprehensive and rigorous selection process. The team conducted a formal request for qualifications (RFQ) process spanning three critical categories: hardware and software reselling, managed services and professional implementation services.

“We had over 150 organisations respond to those three RFQs,” Bob recalls. “We went through and evaluated all of those against those RFQ criteria, and made a selection of the top eight firms across each three of those.”

This comprehensive selection process ultimately yielded 17 partner organisations that now hold contracts with the county to deliver technology services. Key partners including Arctic, INRY and Trace3 operate within the county’s established technology framework, which centers on a Microsoft-centric environment complemented by a hybrid cloud strategy.

The results of this partnership transformation have been profound, enabling a more outcome-focused approach to technology. "The partnership that we have with these – with this narrow list of organisations – lets us not chase the solution landscape, but to ask for what are the solutions based on our desired outcomes," Bob concludes. "And that's just a completely different paradigm."

Adobe Experience Manager underpins digital transformation

Clark County is migrating its website to Adobe Experience Manager as part of its digital transformation strategy. “We’re re-platforming our ClarkCountyNV.gov website onto the Adobe Experience Manager platform. And we believe that gives us a framework that we can work with to continue to evolve our website and a digital assistant and the proprietary language model technology and architecture,” Bob explains.

The platform will support both desktop and mobile access, facilitating the county’s transition to more digital services, and goes towards supporting Clark County’s ‘Business Owner 360’ and ‘Resident 360’ concepts, which aim to reorganise county services around user needs rather than departmental structures. 

“Rather than having our departments at the centre of our service models, really putting business owners and residents at the centre of the service model, and then building and rethinking how we deliver those services around the individuals that we're talking about,” Bob notes.

The Adobe platform will enable a federated content management approach, allowing departmental staff to update information directly, while also supporting multi-channel communication with residents and visitors.

The initiative aims to deliver a more consumer-like experience for government services. “I have an alert that fires when Amazon has a great sale on golf balls, then I want to know about that, so that I can in two clicks later have a box of golf balls coming to my house,” says Bob. 

“We believe that that same capability exists in our interaction with the public: a proactive opt-in, privacy-respectful and secure method by which to let people know about our services, and to let them consume our services in a frictionless way.”

To read the full story in the magazine, click HERE.