The rising stakes of the federal digital user experience
Changes mandated by the bold and encompassing executive order to transform federal customer experience and service delivery in the U.S. are becoming more visibl...
Changes mandated by the bold and encompassing executive order to transform federal customer experience and service delivery in the U.S. are becoming more visible. It’s been about a year since $100 million of the Technology Modernization Fund was publicly directed to projects that cut red tape for both citizens and government employees.
The larger, explicit goal of the executive order and subsequent actions to implement it are lofty: to increase public trust in government.
By improving the processes, policies and technology behind government operations and by prioritizing human-centric design and technological streamlining, the hope is that the actual experiences of people, whom government is meant to serve, improve. Digital modernization should mean the “digital front door” to government is easy to walk through, the path to service easy to find, and the interaction efficient and positive.
It’s no secret that the federal government has the same process-related problems that private sector enterprises have. But its agencies are often 5 to 10 years behind those enterprises in terms of implementing innovations for optimized service and efficiency. There’s a necessary and built-in due diligence in government around adopting new technology that, nonetheless, can result in glacial slowness — and friction because systems and software changes happen so fast today.
In this landscape, with the policy impetus for improvement and the old ways of doing business colliding, federal executives are looking for technologies that deliver true return on investment and help accelerate mission success in a matter of weeks, not years. And with cybersecurity threats ubiquitous, they can no longer afford to implement cloud technology unless it is FedRAMP authorized. That status offers a standardized approach to security authorizations and means vendors must meet a high bar to protect federal data.
To achieve their missions and improve how Americans interact with democracy, agencies need FedRAMP authorized technology that addresses at least four major problem areas. But adding new technologies could exacerbate the problem of overly complex processes and forms rampant throughout the government employee and citizen experiences and, as with anything, the necessary funds must be provided to fix these problems.
The public’s digital services experience
First, consider the myriad ways in which government is meant to serve the public. Maybe a citizen is on a federal website to inquire about a Medicare benefit or disaster relief, or what they’ve paid in taxes and Social Security. Maybe a small business owner is navigating a government-facilitated opportunity to grow in their market or meet the terms of a contract. Maybe a veteran is trying to engage with healthcare services or a scientist with a research project. Maybe an immigrant is seeking an update on a visa or information about loved ones.
The reality is that the primary way of interfacing with the government today is through a website. That means improving the “customer” digital experience with human-centric design is critical in strengthening citizen relations. Simplifying processes across complex public web properties means people are less likely to be mired in confusing processes and buried in forms. Improving ease of use and accessibility can help enhance engagement with government digital services and, more fundamentally, (re)build trust. At the same time, better technological interfacing can reduce the support burden on agencies.
Data management, integrity and quality
Solving the problem of data integrity and quality issues crosses a lot of territory. Not only can the public’s digital services experience, just described, be severely impacted by inputting or reviewing problematic data, but these data management issues also impact the interoperability of the government’s tech stack.
For example, right now most applications supported by the federal government over the last couple of decades are web-based and designed such that people can enter any data they want into freeform text fields. That has had some massive unintended consequences in the government because that data is usually fed to other systems downstream, which creates enormous problems around data validity and increases in help desk support. Until recently, the VA was spending countless hours manually solving downstream data quality problems due to this freeform data entry. Thousands of help desk tickets a month were directly related to data integrity and validation due to the inability to limit user input in freeform text fields. When they implemented a digital adoption platform (DAP) that presents real-time, easily understandable interface messages, navigation guidance and automation for users, the data integrity problem was completely eliminated.
Legacy tech modernization
It’s well known that the federal government has many systems and applications that are antiquated. The need to enhance and renovate legacy platforms has been especially poignant since the advent of cloud computing. But there are compelling reasons why this is no easy feat for the U.S. government. Many of these legacy applications are vital to the mission of a particular agency and have been customized over the years to support the specific requirements of that mission. There aren’t readily available third-party application alternatives on the shelf that send troops into battle, for example, meeting all military requirements and specific conditions that can arise. Unlike many private sector enterprises, the government can’t just buy what it needs from a major vendor or a scrappy startup. Some upgrades are highly customized and complex by necessity and there’s no plug-and-play replacement.
Here again, DAPs help with the usability of legacy systems via powerful UX overlays, as well as offering deeply detailed business process metrics and automated process improvements, all while the government carefully upgrades systems. In this scenario, it’s important that the DAP automatically keeps pace with software changes as they occur incrementally.
Doing so is a huge issue across any tech stack, as functionality and features change, as unit testing and regression testing occur. Digital adoption is an ongoing process that must be seamless in a high stakes digital environment, whether that’s impacting troops on the ground and national security or voters at the polls and electoral integrity.
Federal government employee productivity
A key fourth area where the public sector needs a DAP is in improving the productivity of the government workforce, namely by eliminating the operational drag of poorly optimized software and applications. It’s often clear how government processes and inefficiencies burden citizens. More hidden is how government burdens its own employees. Does the average government employee spend more time wrestling with the technology to do their job than actually doing their job? It’s a reasonable question.
Right now, to reduce these tech-wrestling, time-wasting productivity issues, the Army is rolling out a new system of record for training some two million employees—the nation’s soldiers. They don’t have to read the manual on how to use their enterprise Learning Management System. They don’t have to call the help desk if they experience problems. They don’t have to spend six hours in the application to figure out how to use it; instead, they’ll spend 30 minutes moving smoothly through the application with active, customized guidance and automation that meet them where they’re at and help them in any moment of need right on their screen. This eases the lift inherent in the onboarding and change management processes involved in learning a new or changing application at massive scale. Fundamentally, digital adoption technology like this increases productivity. There’s far less operational drag and individual frustration.
It may be true that there’s more resistance to process changes and streamlining in government than in the private sector. Businesses perish if they don’t innovate and improve. The government can persist longer with the status quo, but user pain and security risks catch up. That pain and those risks can grow so severe that they threaten the agency from carrying out its stated mission, and even worse, threaten our very philosophy of how the government should effectively function.
Within a decade or so, a younger generation will fill many roles in government that a retiring generation fills now. New generations have grown up with seamless digital experiences integrated in their lives. They demand an elegant experience and less red tape, one with the ease and power of Netflix. They will have little patience for a tech stack that is not optimized and prevents them from doing their job most efficiently. This is already a core recruitment issue for the government and will continue to be an issue moving forward. Policy is already recognizing that rising digital ethos — and trust in government might just be saved by it.
Funding a new category of technology
No doubt the CX EO has a number of good intentions to solve such pervasive problems across the government. However, like other EOs and policy updates, these are simply viewed as “unfunded mandates” by government leaders. Without meaningful funding sources, how can agency leaders be asked to identify solutions and implement them?
Just like every category of technology that the government has already identified a critical need for (i.e. customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human capital management, etc.), it’s time to formally appropriate relevant budgets annually to digital adoption platforms. The stakes in digital user experience are simply too high to ignore.
The rising stakes of the federal digital user experience
Changes mandated by the bold and encompassing executive order to transform federal customer experience and service delivery in the U.S. are becoming more visibl...
Changes mandated by the bold and encompassing executive order to transform federal customer experience and service delivery in the U.S. are becoming more visible. It’s been about a year since $100 million of the Technology Modernization Fund was publicly directed to projects that cut red tape for both citizens and government employees.
The larger, explicit goal of the executive order and subsequent actions to implement it are lofty: to increase public trust in government.
By improving the processes, policies and technology behind government operations and by prioritizing human-centric design and technological streamlining, the hope is that the actual experiences of people, whom government is meant to serve, improve. Digital modernization should mean the “digital front door” to government is easy to walk through, the path to service easy to find, and the interaction efficient and positive.
It’s no secret that the federal government has the same process-related problems that private sector enterprises have. But its agencies are often 5 to 10 years behind those enterprises in terms of implementing innovations for optimized service and efficiency. There’s a necessary and built-in due diligence in government around adopting new technology that, nonetheless, can result in glacial slowness — and friction because systems and software changes happen so fast today.
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In this landscape, with the policy impetus for improvement and the old ways of doing business colliding, federal executives are looking for technologies that deliver true return on investment and help accelerate mission success in a matter of weeks, not years. And with cybersecurity threats ubiquitous, they can no longer afford to implement cloud technology unless it is FedRAMP authorized. That status offers a standardized approach to security authorizations and means vendors must meet a high bar to protect federal data.
To achieve their missions and improve how Americans interact with democracy, agencies need FedRAMP authorized technology that addresses at least four major problem areas. But adding new technologies could exacerbate the problem of overly complex processes and forms rampant throughout the government employee and citizen experiences and, as with anything, the necessary funds must be provided to fix these problems.
The public’s digital services experience
First, consider the myriad ways in which government is meant to serve the public. Maybe a citizen is on a federal website to inquire about a Medicare benefit or disaster relief, or what they’ve paid in taxes and Social Security. Maybe a small business owner is navigating a government-facilitated opportunity to grow in their market or meet the terms of a contract. Maybe a veteran is trying to engage with healthcare services or a scientist with a research project. Maybe an immigrant is seeking an update on a visa or information about loved ones.
The reality is that the primary way of interfacing with the government today is through a website. That means improving the “customer” digital experience with human-centric design is critical in strengthening citizen relations. Simplifying processes across complex public web properties means people are less likely to be mired in confusing processes and buried in forms. Improving ease of use and accessibility can help enhance engagement with government digital services and, more fundamentally, (re)build trust. At the same time, better technological interfacing can reduce the support burden on agencies.
Data management, integrity and quality
Solving the problem of data integrity and quality issues crosses a lot of territory. Not only can the public’s digital services experience, just described, be severely impacted by inputting or reviewing problematic data, but these data management issues also impact the interoperability of the government’s tech stack.
For example, right now most applications supported by the federal government over the last couple of decades are web-based and designed such that people can enter any data they want into freeform text fields. That has had some massive unintended consequences in the government because that data is usually fed to other systems downstream, which creates enormous problems around data validity and increases in help desk support. Until recently, the VA was spending countless hours manually solving downstream data quality problems due to this freeform data entry. Thousands of help desk tickets a month were directly related to data integrity and validation due to the inability to limit user input in freeform text fields. When they implemented a digital adoption platform (DAP) that presents real-time, easily understandable interface messages, navigation guidance and automation for users, the data integrity problem was completely eliminated.
Legacy tech modernization
It’s well known that the federal government has many systems and applications that are antiquated. The need to enhance and renovate legacy platforms has been especially poignant since the advent of cloud computing. But there are compelling reasons why this is no easy feat for the U.S. government. Many of these legacy applications are vital to the mission of a particular agency and have been customized over the years to support the specific requirements of that mission. There aren’t readily available third-party application alternatives on the shelf that send troops into battle, for example, meeting all military requirements and specific conditions that can arise. Unlike many private sector enterprises, the government can’t just buy what it needs from a major vendor or a scrappy startup. Some upgrades are highly customized and complex by necessity and there’s no plug-and-play replacement.
Here again, DAPs help with the usability of legacy systems via powerful UX overlays, as well as offering deeply detailed business process metrics and automated process improvements, all while the government carefully upgrades systems. In this scenario, it’s important that the DAP automatically keeps pace with software changes as they occur incrementally.
Read more: Commentary
Doing so is a huge issue across any tech stack, as functionality and features change, as unit testing and regression testing occur. Digital adoption is an ongoing process that must be seamless in a high stakes digital environment, whether that’s impacting troops on the ground and national security or voters at the polls and electoral integrity.
Federal government employee productivity
A key fourth area where the public sector needs a DAP is in improving the productivity of the government workforce, namely by eliminating the operational drag of poorly optimized software and applications. It’s often clear how government processes and inefficiencies burden citizens. More hidden is how government burdens its own employees. Does the average government employee spend more time wrestling with the technology to do their job than actually doing their job? It’s a reasonable question.
Right now, to reduce these tech-wrestling, time-wasting productivity issues, the Army is rolling out a new system of record for training some two million employees—the nation’s soldiers. They don’t have to read the manual on how to use their enterprise Learning Management System. They don’t have to call the help desk if they experience problems. They don’t have to spend six hours in the application to figure out how to use it; instead, they’ll spend 30 minutes moving smoothly through the application with active, customized guidance and automation that meet them where they’re at and help them in any moment of need right on their screen. This eases the lift inherent in the onboarding and change management processes involved in learning a new or changing application at massive scale. Fundamentally, digital adoption technology like this increases productivity. There’s far less operational drag and individual frustration.
It may be true that there’s more resistance to process changes and streamlining in government than in the private sector. Businesses perish if they don’t innovate and improve. The government can persist longer with the status quo, but user pain and security risks catch up. That pain and those risks can grow so severe that they threaten the agency from carrying out its stated mission, and even worse, threaten our very philosophy of how the government should effectively function.
Within a decade or so, a younger generation will fill many roles in government that a retiring generation fills now. New generations have grown up with seamless digital experiences integrated in their lives. They demand an elegant experience and less red tape, one with the ease and power of Netflix. They will have little patience for a tech stack that is not optimized and prevents them from doing their job most efficiently. This is already a core recruitment issue for the government and will continue to be an issue moving forward. Policy is already recognizing that rising digital ethos — and trust in government might just be saved by it.
Funding a new category of technology
No doubt the CX EO has a number of good intentions to solve such pervasive problems across the government. However, like other EOs and policy updates, these are simply viewed as “unfunded mandates” by government leaders. Without meaningful funding sources, how can agency leaders be asked to identify solutions and implement them?
While the Biden administration has requested $200M for the Technology Modernization Fund for fiscal 2024 in an effort to keep the foot on the gas of investments in cybersecurity and customer experience, recently the Senate Appropriations Committee announced its plans to take back $290M in fiscal 2024. This worsens the gap on how government leaders have helped solve such unfunded requests in the past.
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Just like every category of technology that the government has already identified a critical need for (i.e. customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human capital management, etc.), it’s time to formally appropriate relevant budgets annually to digital adoption platforms. The stakes in digital user experience are simply too high to ignore.
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