Terry Gerton Merici, let’s start with you because this new report on digital services is really fascinating. You talk to people kind of across the spectrum, U.S. Digital Services, 18F, state and local digital services organizations. When you listened through all of those conversations, what was the biggest conclusion that surprised you at this point?

Merici Vinton What was so fascinating is across over a hundred people we talked to was the wide variety and huge array of experiences that everyone had. There were very few individuals who showed up to work and kind of had the same impact, the same set of objectives or goals, and essentially what it showed us is that in the digital government field — this is a new field — and there’s no shared mental model for what this work looks like. Effectively, there were no patterns. There were no through lines in the work. And that’s actually an opportunity for us to really define, to look to the past, to see what worked well, but also to define where we wanna go in the future. And that what we did with this entire report and project.

Terry Gerton Laura, I want to come to you next. Merici has just said there are no mental models, there’s no pattern. I know we’ve been talking about digital government services for over a decade, and yet the report says that the government lacks not only those models, but a common theory of change for digital services. What does that mean in practical terms?

Laura Sigelmann Yeah, absolutely. We found across all of the different retros that there wasn’t a coherent strategy, there wasn’t a theory of change time to outcomes, that these different teams and initiatives were operating within their own spaces, their own silos, competing for resources, focusing on their own individual goals rather than sort of this shared agency or government wide outcomes. And that’s really what we mean by theory of change is understanding what those societal level outcomes we are trying to achieve. Is that improved health services, better access to health care, and then how the government as a whole uses digital services to achieve those outcomes, how these different agencies and initiatives engage with that. And so it’s essentially a strategy for how we go from this highest level of societal change all the way down to how are individual teams engaging with that strategy? And how are the outcomes that they are trying to achieve contributing to those broader society and government-wide efforts?

Terry Gerton And so without a theory of change, I mean, this may seem like an obvious question, how do you get results? How do you know what direction to go in?

Merici Vinton It really took a lot of individual empowerment, individual entrepreneurialism. In some cases, political leadership was a helpful partner, but really it took the heroic efforts of individuals to get a lot of this work over the line. A more mature government would say, okay, we expect this, our citizens expect this type of interaction with their government, and this is what we’re going to do and just set it out versus kind of coming in from behind to try to get something over the line.

Terry Gerton But Merici, let’s follow up on that because heroic efforts is usually not a sustainable pattern of behavior. Your report says the field has struggled to scale and relied on workarounds for years. In fact, it says explicitly that the ways the government does work through hiring processes, standards, and common resources are incompatible with modern service delivery and impossible to scale. That’s a pretty strong statement. What did you find there that was broken and what should be fixed?

Merici Vinton There was so much collective energy and effort spent on bringing technologists into government, that that almost became the outcome itself. When I came back into government I realized that the way to hire people like me who are technologists is that there’s no career path. We are in government for a term appointment in most agencies, especially at the U.S. Digital Service, but most agencies it’s similar. It is a series of work-arounds. It is not, let’s say, a lawyer career path or an accountant at the IRS. Those are patterns that have been repeated for decades. And so these work-arounds take a lot of convincing. They take a lot political capital from your chief human capital officer who may not even think that it’s a legitimate work-round. So the effort that is expended to do this just means it can’t scale. And we saw that in all of my time in government. So what we’re recommending is defined pathways, career pathways for this field. If you want the government to be more digital, to make it easier for people across the country to do what they need, then you should make it easy to hire the talent needed to make that happen. And also really to set incredibly high standards for what these services should look like. You know, I worked on the free tax filing project, DirectFile, and we had really high standards that we set for ourselves across accessibility, across interaction. Our work increased trust in the IRS by 86% and had net promoter scores that were incredibly high. Those standards should be the baseline for all standards that government has for interactions. And so you need to bring in the talent to make that work scale and to set those higher standards for users.

Terry Gerton Merici Vinton is a senior fellow and Laura Sigelmann is a senior manager for government capacity at the Federation of American Scientists. Merici, let’s follow that thread then because if we have a hard time hiring technologists, how is it that the report says we build digital teams but not digital services? What does a service-centered model look like and how is different from the way most operate today?

Merici Vinton It’s a really great question. So we really took a lot of inspiration on the service model by looking actually at our international governments that are doing really, they’re more mature in their digital government. And one of them is the United Kingdom. And the way that they take their approach to digital services is around a service. So a service is something that you need to accomplish. So for example, file my taxes or, you know, get my student loan money like … my FAFSA … renew my passport. So these are services and a more mature model builds a service team that cuts across silos. And so effectively you have in one team, the technology team, designers, the user researchers, people that talking to your users next to the policy and the program experts, next to the lawyers, next to your customer support team. And so you’re creating this really great feedback loop that is coherent, that really means the users get their outcome accomplished in one task. Also, if there are appeals or adjudication, it is all part of that same team. That’s what we consider a service team. So it’s not a team of technologists. It is a team of, a cross-functional team of people delivering for people. That’s a very mature model, but we believe that’s actually gonna lead to the best outcome for both users and for government functionally because you’re bringing, you know, more modern approaches to delivery in to some of the more traditional areas of government, some of them more paper-based areas of the government. And there’s an opportunity to make the experience better for both the users and the practitioners that I think is really exciting. And the approach that we’ve taken to date in the federal government in the United States typically has been a centralized digital team that reports into an agency lead or a CIO. And that is kind of its own silo and it’s a very, it’s good model, but it’s been really the only model we’ve had. And what our report is outlining is you can have different models based on the problem that you’re trying to solve. So if you’re implementing legislation, there could be an implementation team. If you’re trying to bring legacy COBOL into a modern cloud-based platform, that’s a different type of skill set that could require a different team. So really what we’re advocating and what we are asking leaders to do is to build the right team for the right problem.

Terry Gerton Laura, let me ask you to chime in here. You did a little bit of work on those international models. Tell us which one, Merici walked through the U.K. model, but is there another one that really strikes you as being a great example?

Laura Sigelmann Yeah, when I was at USAID, I worked a lot with the government of Ukraine and they had a centralized ministry of digital transformation that was responsible for a number of things, delivering on government-wide priorities, setting standards, building and managing shared platforms. And by having this central capacity, they were able to develop services across the government. They had these teams that were building different products and services, end to end. And that’s one of the examples that we’ve looked for. And it also ties into one of our recommendations about building this type of centralized digital capacity in the U.S. And to make sure that we’re able to really hold different agencies accountable, drive momentum for these end-to-end services like Merici mentioned, we need to actually have that capacity within our federal government.

Terry Gerton Merici, the report says this is the time for radical experimentation, delivery and exploration. Radical sometimes sets some people’s teeth on edge, but if you were going down that path, what do agency leaders and the center of government, OMB and GSA, need to do differently right now to create the different future that you all envision?

Merici Vinton It is an opportunity to be ambitious. I think right now what we’re seeing, people losing faith in their institutions, and this has been a decline for decades, and that decline is only increasing. And so this is an opportunity to show that government can deliver in new ways because at this point we’ve got nothing left to lose. What we think is really interesting as a new, more ambitious future is to look at a central government department that has the authority, that has the confidence, the muscular authorities to really drive a modernization agenda, to really ensure that the work that digital teams are doing in government is open sourced and available and repeatable and usable across the government, saving cities, because this project also remember included cities and states, saving them money because they can reuse a lot of the shared platforms that are built once. To really think about, again, we’ve talked about hiring, how the hiring patterns should be implementable at every agency. This is an opportunity to really rethink how we do this, how we have a shared platform like login.gov and to deliver not just the shared services, but also to take this approach to different agencies, into different cities and counties in states across the country. But what we’ve lacked to date is the authority to do this work, the accountability to do this work. It is all kind of been based on moment in time political leadership, moment in time entrepreneurial leaders inside of agencies or from a digital service team. And that’s been great to date, but a more visionary approach could really have really set out a long-term plan for what digital and government looks and feels like, and then just start executing on it immediately.