Page 58 - FCW, June 2017
P. 58

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
Executive Viewpoint
A CONVERSATION WITH RICK DELAPPE
DeLappe discusses how Recreation.gov continues to transform itself to meet ever-changing user needs.
SPONSORED CONTENT
RICK DELAPPE
PROGRAM MANAGER, RECREATION.GOV
How has the field of digital services evolved since the launch of Recreation.gov?
Obviously, technology has evolved significantly since the early 2000s. We didn’t even have smartphones then, so we weren’t thinking
of things like apps and all the tools now available through tablets and phones. Back then, government had the mindset that we had to figure out what we were going to deliver to the public and what they would need from a digital experience.
Now we’re much more focused on finding out from the public what they want and what they need, instead of us trying to decide for them. So a significant change in the delivery of digital services is first looking at it from a different perspective.
How is Recreation.gov changing to meet new user expectations?
We’ve had a long-term contract with a provider of reservation services and trip planning, which is what you see on Recreation.gov today. That contract is nearing its end, so we’ve had to develop a new request for proposals to get a service provider to deliver reservation services and all the associated trip planning. That RFP really took a different shape from the original to incorporate tenets from the U.S. Digital Service’s playbook, such as focusing on user experience, more open and sharable data, and
a variety of new technology that supports what people expect today.
The first playbook tenet is we will strive to understand what people need first. We’ll do that through a number of forums and approaches, considering things like focus groups, on-site
user testing, user observation and continuous feedback. As we evolve through this development process, we will learn a lot. We’ll also be able to incorporate new things we learn along the way.
What are the most challenging aspects of delivering services online? Where we might have campgrounds managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service, the business rules supporting those services are similar. In
more complex areas such as permitting, the rules, regulations, policies and management decisions for how they provide natural resource and visitor protection evolve on separate paths.
To support those policies and regulations, we have to design custom software. Often,
the software can’t be repurposed because
it’s unique to that one location. For example, one of our partners manages river access in Oregon. The river flows through federal land and state land and is adjacent to tribal land. There’s a lot of interest from commercial outfitters that support recreation on the river. Their management plan is like nothing I’ve ever seen. They have a custom solution that works for them, but so far, we’ve had no opportunities to repurpose the custom development elsewhere.
The challenge in delivering services is meeting the unique needs of so many places. There are a lot of good reasons they have unique needs. They evolve out of local circumstances, and they’re often built with the community. They’re not decisions a land manager and agency can just change overnight.
By using a more flexible, configurable
and agile approach in developing a new platform, we hope to support a much broader range of individual needs without complete redevelopment and extend our support services to more programs within our partner agencies.
This interview continues at carahsoft.com/recreation-engagement.
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