The intern convinced Colangelo that there was a great need for automation.
This led to new initiative. There wasn't money in the IT budget to hire professional software engineers. Instead, they created a program to hire computer science savvy interns to work on the project.
The interns met with the business customers, and it led to new approaches "for small and really painful problems for customers," said Colangelo.
In eight weeks, 40 applications were built, including a parking application that had previously been done in Excel, and a printer dashboard to tell them when a printer was running out of toner. The program also led to the development of survey tools, memo generators, and an online tool that replaced paper-based goods and services processing.
"I'm proud of what we've done here," said Colangelo. Among the things he believed helped him to make progress was to "never let a bad day go to waste."
"Every time we had a bad day, we were able to articulate our vision for the IT systems," said Colangelo, and to show leadership why they really wanted certain things, such as a disaster recovery center to prevent email outages.
Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at 
@DCgov, or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed 
. His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.
Read more about Government IT in Computerworld's Government IT Topic Center.
This IT pilot fish at a government agency gets a call from the administrative officer, who's on the verge of hysterics: Her computer is dead, she's having a total meltdown, and it's all his fault.
Free Insider Guide