Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

by Jennifer Pahlka

Projects can fail under both the megacontract and the incremental models. And in both models they can restart and try again. The difference is that they can fail having spent $600 million over twenty years or a few million over just one or two. More importantly, the agency can go back to the drawing board and start gathering even more requirements, or it can launch its second effort with insights gained from the earlier attempt.

The oversight methods could also stand to borrow a bit from venture capitalists. VCs don’t ask how well a team has stuck to a plan, especially one that was created years ago. They ask what the team has learned since it started implementing the plan. They don’t ask for a report on how many formal requirements have been met on paper. They ask for the results of the latest user tests, and sometimes they log in and use the product themselves. They assume, to quote the agile manifesto, that “working software is the primary measure of progress.”

First, we must train and support the people we have. A promising initiative is the Digital IT Acquisition Professional Program, which teaches federal contracting professionals how to help agile, user-centered digital teams acquire the services they need.12 Second, we must hire new people with digital skills. There are a number of nonprofits that are dedicated to bringing a diverse set of technologists into the public sector, and they operate as a coalition under the banner of US of Tech. Third, we must put user-focused public servants in many roles where they can have an impact upstream, and we must connect them across disciplines. A great model is Cecilia Muñoz’s championing of closer ties between policy and tech teams, disrupting the waterfall dynamics that disempower all parties. We need far more efforts like this in far more domains, across all levels of government.

recodingamerica.us.

Streamlined benefits processes can lead to lower administrative costs, which the right likes. Streamlined regulatory processes can mean higher rates of corporate compliance, which the left likes.

Robin Carnahan is leading GSA, which now not only has 18F but also manages the Technology Modernization Fund, with $1 billion for projects that promise to truly modernize systems to achieve specific goals—not

How’s he doing now? And the fund? (Post-Trump)

Clare Martorana, the federal CIO within OMB, has worked with the White House to publish an executive order on customer experience, for the first time giving federal agencies a framework for changes that directly mean something to the public. Mina Hsiang has been hung up on by many executives but it hasn’t dampened her enthusiasm for public service, and she’s returned to DC to lead the USDS.

We advocate for incremental, user-centered, agile development; we must accept that change will also have to be incremental, to meet people where they are, to emerge from the work as we learn along the way. Top-down edicts will be helpful only insofar as they are met with changes in culture and practice from the bottom up.

“Power is the ability to afford not to learn.” When power flows one way—down the waterfall—from policymakers to implementers, from federal to local government, from those with high-priced lawyers and tax accountants to those without, even those the system appears to benefit lose out. Is it any surprise that the most powerful institutions within the most powerful country on earth have resisted the uncomfortable work of developing new and foreign competencies?

The United States has even lost its military advantage on the world stage—we are consistently defeated in war games against China.17