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bad actors,” he said. “What’s interest- ing is we had to coax that out of them. I think they were so enamored with, ‘We are moving to the cloud. Isn’t it great?’ It turns out they had a better story than they thought to tell.”
Others, however, spoke of the chal- lenge of finding the money to deliver needed functionality. Digital Free- dom of Information Act services, for example, don’t save lives or deliver significant cost savings, and a sim- pler process for FOIA requesters can actually increase agencies’ workload and expenses.
“If you’re not getting fee-for-service, you do have to struggle with funding and prioritizing the use of the money that you have,” one participant said.
On occasion, Congress legislates the business case. Another partici- pant pointed to the database that was built to help screen visa appli- cants after dangerous individuals were allowed into the country because the old microfiche-based “watch list” was impossible to keep current. Congress passed a law mandating a globally accessible, real-time database and authorized a fee-for-service model to help fund it.
At the other end of the spectrum, that official said, are the smaller digi- tal projects that border on shadow IT. Such projects are relatively inexpen-
sive and “so close to the business end that the business owners don’t engage with the systems side as much as they used to because they don’t need to,” he said. The challenge is avoiding more of the silos and duplication that digi- tal services teams are trying to erase.
Those teams rarely have such bud- getary reserves, however, and multiple participants said it’s more difficult to fund tools that facilitate their work across multiple projects than it is to fund a single initiative.
“Internally, we don’t have the resources we need to be efficient and effective,” one said. “The collaboration tools that help an office get a policy form and the outreach associated with it in three months,...that’s an amor- phous thing. It’s made it hard for us to justify internal collaboration tools that build efficiency for all the differ- ent things we do.”
Don’t forget the internal customers
Roundtable participants also said agencies too often overlook their own employees and focus solely on outside customers. But internal processes can offer some of the clearest returns on a digital investment.
“I think digital presents a really interesting opportunity to better align our portfolios with the service that we’re providing,” one participant
said. “A lot of times, we think of digital as this very front-of-stage conversa- tion. How do we use digital as a way to get to the backstage aspects? Whether it is the tools that we design for the employees to process the thing, or potentially, how do we let computers do what computers do really well and save the hard, human-facing stuff for humans?”
Moreover, with employee-facing sys- tems, “you can quantify the inefficien- cy and the cost of inefficiency in real numbers,” another said. “If you know you have 100 GS-10s doing the same thing and it takes them two hours to do a task instead of 30 minutes, that’s actual, tangible money.”
Recognize when you’re not so special
Another key to maximizing digital’s impact is borrowing from previous projects rather than reinventing every wheel, participants said.
“There’s a mysticism that we are allowing to fester around some proj- ects in government,” one executive said, “as though every single project is entirely unique, when in fact a lot of these operations look very similar.”
When it comes to call-center sys- tems, web-based tools that monitor an application’s status and other com- mon needs, “these are problems that
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