One-year anniversary of the CX EO: Embracing a citizen-centric mindset
The federal government provides systems that citizens across our nation rely on daily, especially during some of the most crucial moments in their lives.
The federal government provides systems that citizens across our nation rely on daily, especially during some of the most crucial moments in their lives. Recognizing this, the federal government has made a notable investment in enhancing citizen experience (CX), including through President Biden’s December 2021 Customer Experience Executive Order.
The CX EO was released to improve the service delivery of vital systems that citizens utilize each day by placing human design at the forefront. While significant progress has been made toward this effort, continued reliance on legacy technology and conflicting priorities pose challenges for agencies.
The federal government launched several initiatives to implement CX strategies and improve service delivery for citizens. This included allocating funds from the Technology Modernization Fund, establishing Office of Management and Budget guidelines, and analyzing FITARA scorecards, which have provided roadmaps to improving government systems.
However, a year after the CX EO was issued, agency leaders must look to the lessons learned from this past year to refine and improve approaches to CX, starting with a human-centered approach. By orienting CX strategies around the human experience, agency leaders can achieve compliance with the EO and truly accelerate the performance of government systems for all citizens.
According to citizen feedback, bureaucratic delays and a lack of trust in the government continue to hinder customer experience. Many agencies remain risk-averse, utilizing generational legacy systems that can limit modernization initiatives to improve CX. Agencies must address these barriers to ensure citizens can efficiently access vital information, especially during critical situations where citizen interactions with government platforms are high.
Placing a priority on human experiences will ensure that systems evolve, and agencies can better serve citizens. To tailor these solutions around the human experience and citizen needs, agency leaders must understand how citizens and employees interact with the systems they rely upon.
Analyzing the journey of citizen interaction from start to finish will uncover where the gaps in service delivery lie and enable agency leaders to build successful strategies that address these specific needs moving forward. Some agencies have already taken steps to implement human-centered approaches. For instance, the IRS is working to improve American taxpayers’ and administrators’ experience by analyzing users’ journeys to identify technical gaps. As a result of the IRS implementing cutting-edge technology, including electronic signature forms and the Preparer Tax Identification Number’s customized prototype, it improved critical service deliveries for more than 119 million citizens.
Improving CX for citizens will also improve overall employee experience – by understanding how federal employees interact with each workflow, agency leaders can integrate systems that enable federal workers to complete their jobs more efficiently and optimize federal workflows to keep and attract top talent.
When leveraging cloud-based solutions, the Defense Department streamlined every step of the scholarship lifecycle for the agency’s Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarship program, which provides STEM field scholarships for historically underserved groups. Enhancing the SMART program’s information management system has increased standardization within the award process, resulting in nearly 8,000 applications in progress. By placing the user’s experience at the forefront, this innovative process enabled the DoD to expand opportunities to more citizens and enhance experiences for application users and federal workers while simultaneously preparing future thought leaders.
To meet the needs and expectations of citizens using federal systems, leaders must integrate citizen-centric solutions with confidence to streamline their operations across platforms and successfully evolve over time.
Streamlining the process through platform governance
Even with the citizen at the center of every decision, individual departments have different priorities that complicate IT decision making processes. Platform governance is key as multiple technologies, systems and stakeholders interact. Successful platform governance identifies and manages cross-organizational demands simultaneously, thereby reducing time to value and eliminating duplicate efforts across enterprise platforms. In addition, lack of proper governance can become a security issue, as critical data, such as confidential citizen information, and other agency vulnerabilities can be exposed when priorities are not properly communicated.
Establishing a strategy for managing varying stakeholder interests and demands on the system ahead of time ensure a smoother process, and, ultimately, a better experience for the end user. Proper platform governance ensures that the organization has a concrete strategy that identifies specific objectives, resources and procedures, while also determining if the technology is the correct cross-organizational fit overall.
This can be supported by a demand board that establishes whether a need is business critical or an optional enhancement, how a technology will be deployed, and if processes and procedures are being properly followed. From there, the agency can deploy the technology with confidence and improve CX, as the needs of the stakeholders and users will be met with minimal resistance in one environment.
The CX EO provided a strong foundation for agency leaders to improve the critical government systems that citizens rely on daily. Agency leaders must build on what was learned throughout this year and implement solutions oriented around the user journey from start to finish.
It is critical for agency leaders working to improve CX to understand how employees and citizens interact with federal government systems. This human-centric insight and process of implementing platform governance will enable leaders to tailor solutions to specific needs and maximize the overall value of tools to better serve citizens in the future.
Frank Antezana is the CEO and co-founder of iTech AG.
One-year anniversary of the CX EO: Embracing a citizen-centric mindset
The federal government provides systems that citizens across our nation rely on daily, especially during some of the most crucial moments in their lives.
The federal government provides systems that citizens across our nation rely on daily, especially during some of the most crucial moments in their lives. Recognizing this, the federal government has made a notable investment in enhancing citizen experience (CX), including through President Biden’s December 2021 Customer Experience Executive Order.
The CX EO was released to improve the service delivery of vital systems that citizens utilize each day by placing human design at the forefront. While significant progress has been made toward this effort, continued reliance on legacy technology and conflicting priorities pose challenges for agencies.
The federal government launched several initiatives to implement CX strategies and improve service delivery for citizens. This included allocating funds from the Technology Modernization Fund, establishing Office of Management and Budget guidelines, and analyzing FITARA scorecards, which have provided roadmaps to improving government systems.
However, a year after the CX EO was issued, agency leaders must look to the lessons learned from this past year to refine and improve approaches to CX, starting with a human-centered approach. By orienting CX strategies around the human experience, agency leaders can achieve compliance with the EO and truly accelerate the performance of government systems for all citizens.
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CX starts with the citizen
According to citizen feedback, bureaucratic delays and a lack of trust in the government continue to hinder customer experience. Many agencies remain risk-averse, utilizing generational legacy systems that can limit modernization initiatives to improve CX. Agencies must address these barriers to ensure citizens can efficiently access vital information, especially during critical situations where citizen interactions with government platforms are high.
Placing a priority on human experiences will ensure that systems evolve, and agencies can better serve citizens. To tailor these solutions around the human experience and citizen needs, agency leaders must understand how citizens and employees interact with the systems they rely upon.
Analyzing the journey of citizen interaction from start to finish will uncover where the gaps in service delivery lie and enable agency leaders to build successful strategies that address these specific needs moving forward. Some agencies have already taken steps to implement human-centered approaches. For instance, the IRS is working to improve American taxpayers’ and administrators’ experience by analyzing users’ journeys to identify technical gaps. As a result of the IRS implementing cutting-edge technology, including electronic signature forms and the Preparer Tax Identification Number’s customized prototype, it improved critical service deliveries for more than 119 million citizens.
Improving CX for citizens will also improve overall employee experience – by understanding how federal employees interact with each workflow, agency leaders can integrate systems that enable federal workers to complete their jobs more efficiently and optimize federal workflows to keep and attract top talent.
When leveraging cloud-based solutions, the Defense Department streamlined every step of the scholarship lifecycle for the agency’s Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarship program, which provides STEM field scholarships for historically underserved groups. Enhancing the SMART program’s information management system has increased standardization within the award process, resulting in nearly 8,000 applications in progress. By placing the user’s experience at the forefront, this innovative process enabled the DoD to expand opportunities to more citizens and enhance experiences for application users and federal workers while simultaneously preparing future thought leaders.
To meet the needs and expectations of citizens using federal systems, leaders must integrate citizen-centric solutions with confidence to streamline their operations across platforms and successfully evolve over time.
Streamlining the process through platform governance
Even with the citizen at the center of every decision, individual departments have different priorities that complicate IT decision making processes. Platform governance is key as multiple technologies, systems and stakeholders interact. Successful platform governance identifies and manages cross-organizational demands simultaneously, thereby reducing time to value and eliminating duplicate efforts across enterprise platforms. In addition, lack of proper governance can become a security issue, as critical data, such as confidential citizen information, and other agency vulnerabilities can be exposed when priorities are not properly communicated.
Read more: Commentary
Establishing a strategy for managing varying stakeholder interests and demands on the system ahead of time ensure a smoother process, and, ultimately, a better experience for the end user. Proper platform governance ensures that the organization has a concrete strategy that identifies specific objectives, resources and procedures, while also determining if the technology is the correct cross-organizational fit overall.
This can be supported by a demand board that establishes whether a need is business critical or an optional enhancement, how a technology will be deployed, and if processes and procedures are being properly followed. From there, the agency can deploy the technology with confidence and improve CX, as the needs of the stakeholders and users will be met with minimal resistance in one environment.
The CX EO provided a strong foundation for agency leaders to improve the critical government systems that citizens rely on daily. Agency leaders must build on what was learned throughout this year and implement solutions oriented around the user journey from start to finish.
It is critical for agency leaders working to improve CX to understand how employees and citizens interact with federal government systems. This human-centric insight and process of implementing platform governance will enable leaders to tailor solutions to specific needs and maximize the overall value of tools to better serve citizens in the future.
Frank Antezana is the CEO and co-founder of iTech AG.
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