Page 52 - FCW, March/April 2018

FCWPerspectives
Modernizing with the citizen in mind
Agencies are rising to the challenge of providing a satisfying user experience despite the roadblocks to innovation
FCW gathered a group of fed-
eral leaders on Feb. 28 to dis- cuss whether and how agencies are making progress on citizen engagement. Perhaps not surpris- ingly, participants said the key to providing better services is often not technology but people. Agen- cies need visionary leaders and employees who are empowered to try new approaches to serving a public that increasingly demands the sort of seamless customer experience they get from commer- cial online services.
In the course of the conversa- tion, participants also discussed the creative ways they are nding around obstacles, including cul- tural resistance. And though agen- cies differ in their level of engage- ment with the general public, all agreed that improving the way they provide services is absolutely essential.
The discussion was on the record but not for individual attri- bution (see Page 58 for a list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
The operational bene ts of engagement
“In my experience, there has been a real appetite to optimize, but we have separated the operational and programmatic backbone from the engagement side,” one executive said. “We’re doing optimization, but we’re not doing synergy. The challenge arises when you have people who are driven by one of those imperatives or the other. As an example, we made a very critical operational program- matic platform that was open to the world, so it’s certainly engaging, it’s certainly telling our story, but it’s also advancing our operations and limiting the administrative load.”
Another participant agreed that the two activities go hand in hand. “We’re pushing to have human-centric design involved in our IT modernization efforts to ensure that we’re solving the right problem for the right users at the right point in their journey. Then we’ll see the operational bene ts as well.”
One of their colleagues cited dra- matic growth in product management as an encouraging sign that agen- cies are making progress on citizen engagement. “18F and the Digital Services Playbook are industry best practices for nding the right product for the right user at the right time. It
takes a lot of work to get there in the government, but I’ve seen exponen- tial growth in just one year of people wanting to do that and trying to do that and asking for help.”
But others shared their frustration with some familiar obstacles. “I feel like there’s so much inertia in gov- ernment generally, and then when you go into the world of IT, there’s even more inertia,” a participant said. “People will say, ‘We do focus on the user.’ And the answer that we’ve given is, ‘We’re going to go out and actually talk to them. We’re going to stand behind them and watch how they interact with our tools. We’re going to record it, and we’re going to go back and review it.’ If you’ve gotten the buy-in to accept that what the user is saying is valid, the tech piece is easy.”
A number of participants said the Paperwork Reduction Act stymies their efforts to gather feedback from the public. “We try to work with orga- nizations outside the federal govern- ment that may have data because, due to PRA, we can’t actually ask our customers whether or not they like what we’re doing or if it’s useful to them,” one executive said. “We are severely hampered in what data we can gather.”
48 March/April 2018 FCW.COM