The agency said Friday in a request for information that it is conducting market research to identify a service provider to modernize and “continuously improve” the existing cloud environment provided by Amazon Web Services. 

The department said in the RFI that FSA “must evolve cloud capabilities” for general purpose business use, to meet federal requirements laid out in a 2021 executive order on improving national cybersecurity and to “keep pace with today’s dynamic and increasingly sophisticated cyber threat environment.”

The request states that within the first year of awarding a contract, all on-premise applications and infrastructure that remains will move to the cloud. In the second and third year of the contract, “the entire cloud environment must be optimized and modernized as a dedicated workstream” through cloud native design principles in order to take advantage of the commercial cloud’s full benefits. 

“The preponderance of FSA’s applications will migrate into FSA [Next Generation Cloud], managed by the FSA chief information officer,” the request states.

This effort is unrelated to the recent updates to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which was recently overhauled to leverage cloud technologies for the transmission and delivery of FAFSA data, an agency spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop.

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In a report published Monday, the nonprofit conducted a study of 15 agencies, and found that those with recently-appointed product design and user research expertise were more effective at improving customer experience.

According to the nonprofit, the Department of Federal Student Aid was able to improve user experience by formalizing the processes it used to build and launch new products, and to create consistency and cohesion.

The Partnership for Public Service (PPS) found also that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has relied on greater contact with user research experts across an advisory consortium in order to remodel its clinical contact centers.

User-centered design has received a high level of attention from government user design leaders during the pandemic, as agencies were forced to adapt to collecting project evidence through telework consultations.

Earlier this month, VA Deputy Chief Experience Officer Barbara Morton said that so far remote consultations appear to have increased the range of views from veterans that the agency is able to sample.

The study was carried out in partnership with Accenture Federal Services.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct references to a prior report.

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The Department of Education‘s Office of Federal Student Aid established what it calls the Next Generation Program Office with members of its CIO shop to upgrade IT and improve CX simultaneously, said Wendy Bhagat, director of the product marketing and delivery group.

Still, programmatic teams lead the projects the CIO office advises on, and the CX team works more closely with contractors, Bhagat said.

“Having said that, I believe the CIO office at Federal Student Aid will be taking a larger part in our work,” she said during an ACT-IAC event Wednesday. “And I think there will be a lot more collaboration for us moving forward.”

FSA’s CIO office already created a Salesforce Center of Excellence to help the CX team use the software in its work, and a similar CoE is expected for Adobe’s Campaign platform, Bhagat said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a CX office at the department level that partners with its CIO office on multiple enterprise IT initiatives in need of human-centered design.

But that doesn’t mean early collaboration hasn’t been “challenging,” said Simchah Suveyke-Bogin, chief CX officer.

The CIO and CX team partnered on website modernization, which required analysis of how the public engages with USDA’s brand digitally. Looking across every USDA domain and website was a “big ask,” Suveyke-Bogin said.

Suveyke-Bogin’s team also held workshops with the CIO office, inviting each USDA component agency’s webmaster to discuss the resources they lacked to meet customer and employee needs. Out of that effort came the USDA Digital Strategy Playbook.

USDA only stood up its CX team in 2017. FSA, on the other hand, established three CX groups two years ago for brand and design, product marketing and delivery, and customer analytics. All work together closely, with the brand and design group focused on usability testing, user research and human-centered design when building products like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form or the FSA Loan Simulator.

Bhagat’s group oversees customer communication channels like email, texts, studentaid.gov, mobile apps, social media, and paid media.

When the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was passed and student loans were deferred, the product marketing and delivery group assembled a team, including CIO office members, to plan messaging among different borrowers: regular payers, delinquent borrowers and those in default. The group examines communication analytics and refines its processes whenever the loan deferral date is extended.

“And so we actually took the time to develop those customer journeys, figure out what pain points they may have along the way and then develop a communications plan for them — thinking through who they are and what they need at that moment,” Bhagat said. “And that was developing a page on studentaid.gov that was devoted to coronavirus flexibilities and constantly updating that.”

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