Digital transformation has been a central premise of government at all levels tackling the job of ending reliance on legacy technology, upgrading systems and expanding services. Until recently, transformation efforts at the federal level focused on “lift-and-shift,” updating their digital systems or processes to make them better or more innovative, but they didn’t have the customer or end user or employee in mind while doing...

Delivering excellent, equitable, and secure federal services for an outstanding customer experience is a priority that comes from the President’s Management Agenda. Achieving that goal can be helped by learning from a different mindset found mostly in the private sector – product management. Excellent experiences don’t just happen—they need to be designed in a deliberate manner. In a traditional software build, long per...

Words like “bureaucracy” and “red tape” often come to mind when folks think about government, but the quality of customer service is changing – for the better. In December 2021, the White House issued its "Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government." In conjunction with the President's Management Agenda addressing customer experience, agencies ha...

Better customer experiences build trust in government programs When the White House issued its Executive Order on “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government” in December 2021, almost three dozen agencies across 17 departments were designated High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) – agencies which, because of their large customer bases or critical services (or both), have a sig...

Every federal agency recognizes that being audited is an often painful, always time-consuming process. The Department of Defense, for instance, has failed four audits in a row – but it is making progress after decades to keep its financial house in order. A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 identified several challenges that make it harder for agencies to earn clean fiscal bills of health, including problems with their fina...

Today’s consumers are connected, informed, and tech-savvy. They expect their favorite companies to provide exceptional and innovative customer service online. Those expectations now apply to consumers as citizens – they want government agencies at all levels to offer service and support whenever they might need it, and offer a seamless experience across the board. This represents a major shift in how agencies approach their mission...

While we never know what the future holds, what makes the 2020-2021 academic year especially challenging is that we do not have a playbook for educating students in the middle of a pandemic. K-12 schools are trying to balance an operating plan with daily changes to evolving safety and health regulations. The current environment has dramatically accelerated the use of interactive communication tools, including teleconferencing, video, SMS/text,...

The Office of Management and Budget has established a Cross-Agency Priority Goal charging government to provide a modern, streamlined, and responsive customer experience across public sector organization. Government executives are embracing the concept of customer experience as a means to improve the usability and reliability of critical digital services like patent services, veterans’ benefit delivery, student loans, disaster aid, and t...