A Blueprint for Designing Better Digital Government Services

(Illustration by iStock/ Mykyta Dolmatov)

Public perceptions about government and government service delivery are at an all-time low across the United States. Plagued government legacy systems—too often using outdated programming language—are struggling to hold up under the weight of increased demand, and IT modernization efforts are floundering at all levels of government. This is taking place against the backdrop of a rapidly digitizing world that places a premium on speedy, seamless, simple, and secure customer service.

Government’s “customers” typically confront a whiplash experience between accessing services from the private sector and government. If a customer doesn’t like the quality of service they get from a particular business, they can usually turn to any number of competitors; that same customer has no viable alternative to a service provided by government, regardless of the quality of that service.

When Governor Josh Shapiro took office earlier this year in Pennsylvania, the start of a new administration presented an opportunity to reexamine how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania delivered services for residents and visitors. As veteran government technologist, Jennifer Pahlka, points out, government tends to be fixated on ensuring compliance with policies and procedures frequently at the expense of the people they serve. In other words, while government services may fulfill statutory and policy requirements, the speed, seamlessness, and simplicity in which that service is ultimately delivered to the end customer is oftentimes an afterthought.

There’s a chorus of voices in the growing public interest technology movement working to shift this stubborn paradigm to proactively and persistently center people at the heart of each interaction between government and the customer. In fact, Pennsylvania is part of a growing coalition of states transforming their digital services across the country. For Pennsylvania and so many states, the road to creating truly accessible digital services involves excavating a mountain of legacy systems and policies, changing cultural and organizational paradigms, and building a movement that puts people at the center of the problem.

In Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro signed a new executive order that created the Commonwealth Office of Digital Experience (CODE PA) to meet Pennsylvanians’ needs, whether it’s a resident facing financial shock or a business just getting off the ground looking for the steps they need to take to make their dream a reality. The scope of services and benefits offered by government are vast, but too often people are lost trying to navigate their way through different agency websites and application processes. CODE PA’s goal is to take the inside baseball out of accessing government support.

If we think about a resident in Pennsylvania facing financial shock and put ourselves in their shoes, it becomes clear where CODE PA plays a role. Let’s call the resident Beth. Beth just lost her job, is a mother of three, and has bills on the counter waiting to be paid. Today, Beth would have to know which separate agencies offer unemployment benefits, health insurance for her kids and herself, and she may not even know that she’s eligible for help with her heating bill, her food bill, and more to help keep her family secure during this period of transition. Imagine a world where we could give her one place to go, one form to fill out, one seamless interaction that can help connect her across the state to receive critical benefits.

What sounds so obvious to the public, requires a Herculean effort to execute in government. For CODE PA to make that scenario a reality, the team and technologists across government and the Governor’s Office will need to simultaneously execute strategies in data sharing, simplification of identity and access management, and collaboration across agencies that has truly never occurred before. CODE PA will be the storytellers and champions for change, the designers of new experiences with government services, and the champions of the simplification of complex processes that are mired in “the way things have always been done.”

So, how do we—and other future and existing government leaders—get there? Below we share how CODE PA is breaking the mold of traditional government service delivery and ways public sector organizations both big and small can better steer technology across complex systems to make government work more seamlessly for its citizens.

Applying the “five-why” rule to digital service projects. The idea of implementing a new digital system can be daunting. Adding in the complexity of changing the process and culture of an organization on top of that can keep people up at night. But digitizing bad process just leads to a bad digital process and doesn’t accomplish the goal of improving consumer experience.

The CODE PA team takes a very similar approach to that of the ever-curious 4-year-old in asking “why” repeatedly in our discovery sessions to get to the root of our problem statement. It helps us break down the priorities with our partners and the challenges they face—Is this complexity because of legislation, is it to protect our consumers, or is it simply because it started that way and never changed?

In many discovery sessions, asking why has transformed the scope of the project and reinforced the importance of bringing user experience research to the front of the line on most of our efforts. Often, the scope of needing an entire new website or custom tool that’s being requested can be narrowed down to improving the visibility of an existing tool or making content more consumer-friendly.

Leaning on lessons already learned within the public interest tech ecosystem. Our efforts were accelerated and stress-tested through early and frequent engagement with various civic tech leaders—many of whom are current and former public sector leaders —from organizations such as US Digital Service, 18F, US Digital Response, Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, San Francisco Digital Services, and Colorado Digital Service, among others.

While Pennsylvania has a lot of catching up to do, our efforts were fast-tracked as our partners graciously shared lessons from their own experiences in setting up a digital services team:

• USDS and 18F set the standard of making their work fully transparent, publishing their code in open code repositories, developing reusable playbooks, and encouraging government work differently by pulling in passionate people inside and outside of public sector that could help encourage that change.
• Massachusetts, Colorado, and California pushed the boundaries on job titles in the public sector by bringing in “Product Owners” and reimagining digital delivery with the formations of new teams.
• The Beeck Center and USDR supported us by providing recruitment best practices in the public sector for digital service teams, and continue to be trusted partners as we look to employ innovative procurement practices.

That said, we realized that “future proofing” an executive order from all potential risks and vulnerabilities is an impossible and foolhardy task. With insight not just from different agencies across the commonwealth but from other governments across the country, our executive order asks our teams to approach their efforts with “curiosity, empathy, and integrity,” acknowledging we must give ourselves some grace to make mistakes in order to mature.

Putting storytelling at the center of change. We’re asking Pennsylvania’s government to stretch in new ways, without many benchmarks outside of the state to show a clear understanding of how that stretch won’t lead to a pulled muscle. A lot of the proposed change must happen in bureaucratic ways: data sharing agreements, infrastructure modernization, procurement policy updates. CODE PA helps bring people to the table from across the spectrum of executives, legal, agency leaders, IT, procurement, and more to get the necessary momentum for a real impact.

In the first few weeks of the office existing, it was clear that our identity and access management infrastructure was going to be a hurdle to improving consumer experience. So, we gave a story and a name to the end “consumer”: Beth. We identified that folks like Beth could be challenged at the very outset by putting the burden on her to generate separate accounts for each state government service she wanted and learn the intricacies of separately navigating each system. We identified how the experience could improve for Beth with each of the proposed changes that scaffold on top of each other. We had approval to move forward in 15 minutes. Bringing the consumer to the forefront of the explanation took the complexity out of the conversation and clearly identified how critical the need was and why we needed to move forward with the change.

Giving digital strategy a seat at the table. In deciding where to situate the team within the commonwealth, we prioritized the need for long-term stability, collaboration with our Office of Information Technology (OIT), and empowering the team to tackle thorny problems while making the biggest impact possible. To address these needs, we created a unique reporting structure to give CODE PA support from our OIT colleagues as well as from the Governor’s Office. In addition to co-reporting to the state chief information officer and to the governor’s director of digital strategy, the CODE PA ED also serves on the executive team of the Office of Administration—making sure they have a seat at the table and direct access to executive-level leadership. Thanks to this matrixed positioning, the CODE PA team can quickly reach several levels of government, to surface lessons learned “on the ground” to the very top, leverage buy-in from the executive level to drive change, and ensure their priorities don’t compete—instead, they amplify.

Aligning digital services with policy priorities. A digital services team—especially one started from scratch—can have a heavy workload over its lifetime. And while it can be tempting to always put out the fires closest to the hose, we’re keeping the administration’s agenda and long-term strategic policy goals in mind when prioritizing CODE PA’s resources, such as the governor’s money-back guarantee for permits, certifications, and licensing applications.

Government oftentimes imposes financial, legal, and administrative burdens upon applicants if they do not meet government’s rigid timelines while simultaneously having no apparent consequence if government misses those same timelines; we wanted to turn this paradigm on its head to establish a date-certain for each license, permit, or certificate by which applicants will hear back. If applicants don’t receive a response by that date, the agency responsible will refund their application fee. One of CODE PA’s first tasks was building a platform where consumers can request a refund for the governor’s new permitting money-back guarantee and ensuring agencies can manage the workflow of reviewing and processing the refund. The new system was researched, prototyped, developed, and executed all in-house—an effective use of resources and just one of the many ways CODE PA is being used as a tool to complement policy goals.

As part of the new administration, we look around us and see a team of product managers, software engineers and developers, user experience designers, and user research strategists creating a space for themselves in a commonwealth that’s never hired for some of these roles before. CODE PA brings added capacity that doesn’t replace the work of existing OIT staff, but rather enhances it. From the governor and his chief of staff down to our newest junior developers, our attitude toward digital services has rapidly evolved to a simple maxim: They should be easy to use and easy to administer.

We acknowledge, however, that while this maxim at first blush seems astonishingly simple and intuitive, it has been historically difficult to achieve because teams still confront byzantine rules and procedures; perverse incentive structures that reward process compliance over outcomes-based performance; and lack of alignment with policy goals. To be clear, our approach does not create a panacea for these challenges but provides an alternative path for those in government with the courage to be curious enough to interrogate the why and how we deliver services.

Undoubtedly, we will continue to run into problems that have always confronted government—replicating solutions at scale, developing outcomes-based incentive structures, and putting the customer at the heart of government service delivery. We also recognize that early successes like launching our first product for permitting refunds, or hiring a powerhouse team to get the job done are not a measure of true success. While those successes will certainly provide momentum for changing the status quo ethos that pervades government, sustaining this momentum will require assiduous coordination.

While the magnitude of the problems and sheer challenges can be overwhelming, we are singularly focused on our mission to deliver exceptional services to our customers. With each successive day, closer alignment on people, priorities, and purpose in governments everywhere will build a more promising future for our residents and how they access crucial public services.

Read more stories by Joe Lee, Annie Newman & Bry Pardoe.