I have read a couple of interesting articles lately on Obama's development of govt digital nous. Highlights below:
I like this description of the drivers for technological advancement and change. The main one being the disaster and disaster recovery of the US healthcare site
Healthcare.gov was a big driver for technological progression in US Govt digital strategy
“then came the healthcare.gov website. Here’s this great policy that gets through Congress. It’s a brilliant business model, it has all these pieces to it…and a website is going to mess it up? Even once they fixed it, the website still took seventy pages to click through [and complete enrollment]. If you had to go through seventy pages to buy something at Amazon, would you do it?”
Source: The White House’s Alpha Geeks| Medium, backchannel, Steven Levy, July 2015
Another great article on how Obama has recently brought some quality digital peeps into govt tech.
Source: Inside Obama’s stealth startup| Fastcompany | Jon Gertner, June 2015
“Government has done technology and IT terribly over the last 30 years and fallen very much behind the private sector," Obama says. "And when I came into government, what surprised me most was that gap."
Development of a tech pipeline for govt.
While the reasons behind this initiative and its scope have not been made clear before, in the president’s view, the idea of building a "pipeline" of tech talent in Washington starts with practical appeal: Better digital tools could upgrade the websites of, say, the Veterans Administration, so users get crucial services that save time, money, and (for veterans in need of medical help) lives. "But what we realized was, this could be a recipe for something larger," the president explains. "You will have a more user-friendly government, a more responsive government. A government that can work with individuals on individual problems in a more tailored way, because the technology facilitates that the same way it increasingly does for private-sector companies." In other words, if Obama’s tech team can successfully rebuild the digital infrastructure of Washington—an outcome that is by no means certain yet—you might not only change its functionality. You might transform Americans’ attitudes about government too. And you might even boost their waning feelings of empowerment in an ideologically riven country of 320 million people.
In Government cost conflates with importance
One of the first lessons Dickerson learned about D.C. when he arrived was that the city traditionally conflates the importance of a task with its cost. Healthcare.gov ultimately became an $800 million project, with 55 contracting companies involved. "And of course it didn’t work," he says. "They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to build a website because it was a big, important website. [as compared to Twitter with cost perhaps of around $60 million]
Waterfall vs. agile in government
there wasn’t anyone to insist that the now-well-established Silicon Valley practice of building "agile" software—rolling out a digital product in stages; testing it; improving it; and repeating the process for continuous improvement—would be vastly superior to (and much, much cheaper than) a patchwork of contractors building out a complete and monolithic website.
This remains an anathema to current operating practices in most governments.
Making government better tech clients
"Our underlying goal is to make better clients, and to make the agencies understand a new way of doing things," she says. "We’re never going to be big enough to take on the $75 billion market. But we will be big enough to help people out there make better decisions on how to build, or buy, their digital services."
This remains an area with a lot of potential. Connecting experts to allow better decision making of digital service production is a great idea.
Beware the dangers of invisible success.
Things which work, are fast, and intuitive fade into the background.
The paradox here is that when the tech teams succeed with a project like the I-90 form, or with any retooled government website, users likely won’t think much about it. It will be fast and intuitive. It will not crash when you use it. And you will then get on with your life.
Testing with users.
By constantly testing their software with users, they can gauge improvements in real time