OPM introduces new IT pilot to improve customer experience

The Office of Personnel Management is in the midst of a pilot with a small number of agencies to improve the applicant experience for its retirement systems, part of a broader push to get the organization away from paper documents altogether.

Catherine Manfre, chief transformation officer at OPM, said that their “north star has been people first. And what that has meant to us is how do we think about putting our customers first and our people first?”

“The initial focus of the pilot is really on the front end of the experience, allowing future annuitants to go through a digital application process,” she said during an interview on Federal Monthly Insights — Trustworthy AI in the Workforce. “What we’re trying to understand in the pilot phase is really the applicant experience and some of the things that we can make improvements on, to make that part of the journey more seamless and easy, for both the individual annuitant but also actually for the agency itself, because there are different handoffs in that new retirement process.”

Manfre said she not only wants to think about if OPM is delivering a great technology, but if they’re delivering a technology that is “usable, and functionable, and people can understand how to use it.”

“We really want to make sure that we’re thinking about all the people involved. Our customers are a primary input to understanding both their pain points and how the pain points can be solved. But we are also asking how any of our technology changes, whether they’re about our retirement systems or in other places, impact our workforce,” Manfre said.

OPM has recently been gathering data, both quantitative and qualitive, for better insight on what is working and where improvements can be made with the system. That collection effort will continue through the end of 2024.

Manfre said the office has also been using external dashboards as a way to help collect high quality data.

“We’ve thought about the dashboards as actually accomplishing a couple different objectives. One objective is helping to make sure that the data is actually high quality, because one of the strategies is if you put the data back in front of people, it’s easier actually to validate whether or not there’s a problem with the data,” she said. “We felt it was important to show the capability of the data in a way that people can really easily digest. I think ultimately, what dashboards and what data is all about, though, is really allowing people to make more real time decisions about their workforce.”

Data also plays a key role when it comes to artificial intelligence. Manfre said “it’s really important to make sure that data is high quality and can be trusted to be used in whatever the AI algorithm that organization is using.”

OPM has also been making efforts to recruit the right AI talent into government.

“I think AI is only as good as the people that you have. Not just the people who can do the work of the large language models and some of the more technical aspects of AI, but the people that also understand the business problem of what it is you’re actually trying to solve with AI,” Manfre said. “Through our Tech to Gov initiative, we have been trying to help recruit talent into government and also working on a number of things related to creating position descriptions, libraries and playbooks to better allow agencies to get that talent into government. The last piece is making sure we have the right governance in place to have responsible use cases of AI and making sure that we have the right processes to really make sure that we’re using that in the most appropriate way.”

Manfre said tracking early career talent at OPM has been a high priority over the years. With 85% of government work outside of the D.C., Maryland and Virginia area, there is widespread opportunity to find a government career.

“There’s basically a job for every kind of job occupation you can think of in government,” she said. “That is the message that we’re really trying to make sure that early career talent across the country understands.”

OPM has been supporting agencies with a few objectives to recruit early career talent.

“One thing is we’ve made some updates to our Pathways regulations, which would make it easier for agencies to convert interns into full-time hires. There’s a suite of initiatives around how to make the intern experience itself better, so that people feel connected to one another. The last initiative is around apprenticeships — how we think about how people that are going to non-degree programs, or people without bachelors or other types of college degrees, can come into government,” Manfre said.

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