White House Seeks Private Sector Ideas for Boosting Government Performance
The Obama administration has had isolated successes in pulling government processes into the 21st century and improving customer service, said Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, but too much of the usual way of doing business remains unacceptable. To that end, the White House assembled dozens of CEOs Thursday to brainstorm how the government can use technology to improve customer service, streamline operations and maximize return on IT investment. The effort differs from past reinventing government pushes because of its high-level focus and also because current technology is better, cheaper, faster and lighter, said Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients. In his seven months as CPO, it’s become clear that the government’s “significant technology gap” is one of the biggest barriers to transformation, he said. If a private sector company used the antiquated systems the government uses, it would be out of business long ago, he said.
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President Barack Obama highlighted some of those antiquated processes in his opening remarks to the CEOs, who Zients said represented companies that have been leaders in using technology. “This is embarrassing,” Obama said. Although the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office receives 80 percent of applications electronically, it must print out each application and manually scan it into a case management system, he said. The process is “eminently solveable -- hasn’t been solved yet,” Obama said. Government workers want to provide good service, and many are frustrated their children have better technology in their backpacks than they do at the office, he said. “When Washington lags a generation behind on how we do business, that has real and serious impacts on people’s lives."
Technology is just an enabler, said Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, co-moderating a breakout session. He pulled out a chart that summarized the “homework” responses of the CEOs in the room and pointed out that game-changing technology ranked “dead last.” The CEOs listed establishing a culture of customer service and figuring out how to capture an understanding of customers’ needs as the most important things a company could do. Co-moderator David Hayes, deputy secretary of the Interior, said that all government agencies have customers, even though it might not be readily apparent. Interior serves 275 million people who visit national parks and lands each year. It also is responsible for trusts for American Indians but has done a “lousy job” tracking their money, Hayes said.
Basic metrics and data are key, said Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook. The company is faced with the challenge of both solving people’s current problems and anticipating what they'll want next, he said. Part of that can be done by measuring what people do with the site -- if most people go to a particular part of the site when they first log in, then that space should become more visible, he said. Similarly, if most people go to the State Department to get passports, then passport information should be no more than one click away from the main page, he said. (It is.)
Southwest Airlines often asks for feedback just by posing questions on its blog, said CEO Gary Kelly. The results are remarkably accurate, he said. Surprisingly, they tend to mirror the responses the company gets when it uses more scientific means of gathering data, he said. Kelly also emphasized the idea of self-service. Most of the company’s customers prefer to make their own bookings online rather than call and speak to a reservation agent, he said. People want a process that’s simple and intuitive, and to the extent that the government can do the same, society would probably prefer it, he said.
Most federal employees are ready for a culture of customer service, they just want to know that management will back them up, said Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. David Holway of the National Association of Government Employees said federal employees get a new boss every four to eight years and hear again and again how things will be different and better -- and then find their benefits cut. New administrations have no history of listening to employees, he said, so they must put in the effort to consistently show that people are important. He and Newmark cited a competition in which the president asked the Department of Veterans Affairs for ideas to cut costs. Some 19,000 employee ideas were submitted, whittled down by field offices, then the final 10 chosen by a panel of judges, including Newmark. Those 10 ideas, about half of which don’t cost anything, are being implemented in 2010, Chopra said. The entire project cost about $2,000 in programming time, he said.
Holway also suggested the federal government could look at the Massachusetts model, in which all IT workers were consolidated into one department rather than answering to their various agencies. People didn’t like it at first, he said, but now they're beginning to have a common purpose and are saving money. Hayes suggested that consolidation might not work, saying the National Park Service has very different IT needs from the Bureau of Land Management. But, said Holway, that’s exactly what the agency heads in Massachusetts said.