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FCWPerspectives
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March/April 2018 FCW.COM
Another agreed that the legislation “is a pain point. We’re being expected to navigate it at the same time we’re getting pressure to engage citizens.”
However, one of their colleagues pointed out that there might be a good reason for the limitation. “Could it be to avoid overtapping customers? You come into a world where every single person wants to get feedback on every single thing. It gets to the point where you say, ‘Stop asking me about it.’”
“We should work on that, but it shouldn’t stop us,” another participant said. “We also think for any given tool, once we get to ve people in user test- ing, we keep hearing the same things over and over. Do we need a survey of a thousand respondents? Not really. We just call people on the phone.”
Honoring the (legacy) pioneers
One executive offered some insight into the path to better citizen engage- ment. “I think the way we got here
informs how we get out of it. We got here in part because we haven’t been able to make trade-offs or prioritize as a government. And part of it is that you have 172 task-based applications that were built because you have one person who had a particular need and didn’t have any incentive to work with other parts of the organization. And then the next person who had a very similar need bought something and so on. And of course, everyone said, ‘We’re all very different so we can’t possibly coordinate.’”
Fortunately, the executive added, “user-centric design and a product mindset can help you get past your organizational barriers and remem- ber why we’re here in the rst place — which is to do a thing that ben- e ts people. Suddenly, the approach changes, and people say, ‘Yeah, it is stupid that we have three things that do exactly the same job. Maybe we should just have one thing that does
that job really well.’”
A number of participants agreed
that agencies need to be mindful of how they ended up with the systems they have now — and the people involved.
“Part of what we’re dealing with when we talk about legacy systems is the pioneers of the past,” one executive said. “In some ways, you have a coalition of the willing who have proven their capacity to do this before. Whether they did it right or effectively may be up for debate, but I think we have to be very careful of the narrative if we really want to do things that are going to stick.”
Others cautioned against focusing too much on any of the individual players. While the honor-the-pioneers idea has merit, one said, “we have to change structures and we have to change expectations. We have to change how we approach our bud- geting internally. We have to change
PHOTOS: KHARRY WOLINSKY