Federal CIO: Technology is the “easy part” of improving the CX

Biden’s White House priority to make the government less uncomfortable for Americans and improve their satisfaction and trust in the government in the process will require a change in the government’s internal, bureaucratic processes, senior technical officials said at the summit. Code of America on Tuesday.

“Technology is the easy part,” said Federal IT Director Claire Martorana in an interview with FCW.. “I have not found anything in my six or more years in government that is actually a confusing technical problem.

The agencies are currently implementing a list of specific government service redevelopment projects, as outlined in President Biden’s 2021 Executive Order and priorities in the President’s governance program.

The goal is not just to implement these projects, said Mina Hsiang, administrator of the US digital service, to the FCW on the sidelines of the conference. “It’s about turning iterative, user-oriented design into a status quo for the way we run programs.”

Some progress has already been made, leaders said on Tuesday. It is critical that these efforts to facilitate government access for citizens have the support of the White House.

“We’ve been talking for a long time about not being able to do technology without this feedback,” General Services Administration Administrator Robin Carnahan told a panel on Tuesday. “To get the president to talk about it and sign an executive order and spread the word to all the agencies and the whole government, ‘this must be a top priority’ is victory, yall.”

In the Office of Management and Budget itself, the executive order was a “unique principle of organization,” Martorana said.

“The OMB director has distributed this throughout the organization to make this a major focus,” she said. “The president is really interested in that, so I see something coming back to us that makes our job easier.”

Both Hsiang and Karnahan hinted at the government’s broader understanding that involving technical teams in policy-making and implementation helps help implement policies successfully.

However, Xiang told the FCW that he often sees teams that have to confront the way political ideas and then legislation often occur separately from the implementation and actual use of any service.

This fragmentation could create policy blockers that prevent service improvements by requiring collaboration with decision-makers to bring about the non-technological changes needed to improve service delivery, she said.

“Policy implementation is something like this very linear process,” she said, citing the implementation of the Medicare and Medicaid Services Center’s Medicare Access Act and the re-authorization of CHIP as an example of trying to use human-oriented design instead of more traditional performance. processes. Hsiang previously worked in a USDS team with the Ministry of Health.

One of the goals was to give doctors more data on effectiveness.

“We don’t know which will be the most used format. We don’t know what the data will look like,” she told the project.

“So we could do what we usually do, which is to clarify it in advance and hope it’s useful.” Instead of what we did, we set out a process and said, “Okay.” So we will get the data and then we will start this iterative process, human-oriented, to develop reports with data that are actually useful to people, “she said.

Implementing changes to state-run federal programs also often raises questions about what federal oversight or requirements come with that program, Hsiang said.

Countries that want to use a new solution to determine who qualifies for Medicaid may need to work with a CMS to see if a solution qualifies or if an exemption is needed, she said.

The Customer Experience Execution Order has “operating structures” designed to facilitate the process of cooperation between agencies and OMB to make this type of redirection faster – “the shorter you can make the process, the more iterations you can make, Said Hsiang.

One public priority of the Biden administration is the effort to reorganize the provision of public services around life experience, not bureaucracy.

There is also an iterative design here. What exactly this looks like in his conclusion could change as the effort progresses, Martorana told the FCW.

In the panel, Martorana said that the long-term sign of success for the current government effort would be to have “the only gateway to government through which you can enter, and that we know who you are and that it is safe and secure for you to make deals.” with the government and you are treated with respect and kindness. “

Efforts are currently underway to restore the GSA USA.gov website to make it the only website where Americans can provide a range of services in one place.

“Organizing around life experiences makes us start thinking about how a client goes through multiple agencies and how we design the best experience for that person and then what possible policy changes should happen,” Martorana told FCW.. “That’s how I really think about it, to take baby steps forward.”

“We will learn gradually because we do not build the whole thing and then we try to find out if all our customers want to use this thing, right?” She continued. “We will learn this through this iterative design process.”