Page 66 - FCW, November, December 2018

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November/December 2018 FCW.COM
DrillDown
VA.gov relaunches
as a portal to
benefits and services
The digital services team at the Department of Veterans Affairs is unifying all the agency’s offerings under a single online umbrella
BY ADAM MAZMANIAN
Amid a barrage of daily headlines about turnover, disarray and mismanagement, the Department of Veterans Affairs is seeking to reinvent itself as an agile agency focused on customer service. The effort is paying off. Without much in the way of publicity, a unified VA ser- vices website at Vets.gov has attracted 40,000 daily users and spurred a 700 percent increase in online appointment scheduling.
Marcy Jacobs, executive director of VA’s Digital Service, was recently hon- ored with a Service to America Medal for Management Excellence for her work on the site.
But despite the success of the Vets. gov deployment, the digital services team plans to pivot to a new content plan in November.
As VA Secretary Robert Wilkie announced at a recent Senate hearing, a new VA.gov website was scheduled to launch on Veterans Day. Instead of serving as a corporate front door for the VA organization, the reimagined VA.gov will be a portal for veterans to access a full suite of services.
The new site was built along the
same lines that the development of Vets. gov followed, including a plain-language approach and an action-oriented design, Jacobs told FCW.
“People don’t come to government websites to read things,” she said. “They
portal, the DS Logon offered in conjunc- tion with the Defense Department and ID.me, a private-sector identity-proofing service that links a person’s government- issued ID to a mobile device.
Mobile users won’t be able to use the
“People don’t come to government websites to read things.They come
to get a task accomplished.” — MARCY JACOBS, DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS
come to get a task accomplished.” Right now, VA hosts dozens of web- sites that generate 10 million visits monthly. VA.gov garners the most traffic, so developers decided to incorporate the content from the other sites under the umbrella of a single, obvious destination. The Vets.gov site will be the first to be rolled under the VA.gov umbrella, but more will follow. As is the case with Vets.gov, users of the central site will be able to access their data and services using credentials from the MyHealtheVet
fingerprint or facial recognition logins built into those devices, but there are plans to include that feature in the future.
At launch, the redesigned VA.gov will focus on linking users to nine benefit hubs that cover “20 things that people are trying to do most of the time,” Jacobs said.
The login will take users to an aggregated view of their VA activity. Veterans will see prescription refills, claims status, upcoming medical