The government is widely known as being resistant to change and leery of innovation, but that may be one of those truisms that is no longer true — or at least, not true as often.
Chris Cairns, director of the General Services Administration’s 18F Consulting, which creates user-centric digital services for agencies, said that the organization has had little trouble finding agencies ready and willing to welcome its help.
“I am just totally blown away at how easy it’s been” to find clients, Cairns said. “18F has just become this whole phenomenon.”
GSA launched 18F in December 2013.
Greg Godbout, CTO at the Environmental Protection Agency, told the audience during his keynote speech about how Walt Disney World works now. Visitors to the theme park who are staying at a connected hotel can get a “Magic Band,” a wrist band that unlocks the hotel room, grants admission to the park, reserves access to certain attractions and allows the guest to buy items at shops and charge them to the room.
It is, he said, “One seamless organic organization, really one service-oriented architecture. That’s how we should be able to work in government, yet we are so far away from that experience.”
Cairns and Godbout where among the 15 federal officials who took part Tuesday in an AFCEA Bethesda “roundtable” event titled “Digital Services Driving Change in Government.” The officials went from table to table having small-group discussions, rather than occupying the same stage.
Government organizations should serve as their own integrators, Godbout said, rather than turning that responsibility over to contractors.
18F is filling that role in its engagements. Cairns said the organization takes a “user-centric design” approach to build systems that meet the needs of the users. Planners use a variety of methods to try to get the users to articulate just what they need to be able to accomplish. While that usually cuts down on the number of iterations needed, it really accelerates when the project moves into the prototyping stage.
“Once you start to put working software in front of people, it has an amazing way of drawing out what their needs are,” he said.
While there are any number of methods that can improve the software development process for digital services — Godbout advocated agile development, for one — motivation is also important.
“I think government is just ready to do IT better,” said Cairns.
