The new office will report to DHS’s Office of the CIO and be led by Dana Chisnell, who’s been serving as executive director of customer experience at the department for the past year. She also served two separate tours of service with the U.S. Digital Service.

“The Department of Homeland Security interacts with more Americans, on a daily basis, than any other federal agency,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “We understand that for government to effectively serve the public, our services, resources, and support must be easily and readily accessible. DHS is committed to meeting that mandate, and our new Customer Experience Office will help ensure an effective, efficient, and customer-first approach to all our work on behalf of the American people.”

Following the Biden administration’s 2021 customer experience executive order, CIO Eric Hysen has made improving service delivery a top priority for his office.

“DHS is committed to improving how we interact with over one billion people each year, to improve service delivery and strengthen our critical security missions,” Hysen said. “This new office will prioritize customer-focused service delivery and serve as a model within the Department to implement President Biden’s customer experience vision.”

In August 2022 at FedScoop’s FedTalks, Hysen announced an initiative to ramp up the hiring of customer experiences specialists across DHS. And now with the new CX office opened, DHS is continuing to recruit such personnel.

The White House’s 2024 budget proposal requested more than $500 million to support customer experience initiatives, including standing up CX offices at large departments that deliver important services to the American public. DHS was listed as one of those agencies in the request.

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The Biden administration requested more than $500 million as part of its budget proposal, released Thursday, to support a variety of customer experience (CX) programs in line with the 2021 executive order on transforming customer experience and service delivery.

A core element of the proposal is to stand up or expand CX offices at the departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, Treasury and Veterans Affairs, the Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Census Bureau.

In total, the Biden administration hopes to hire 120 full-time employees who have customer experience and digital product delivery experience to staff those offices.

“This will enhance capabilities to learn directly from the public and identify pain points, analyze customer feedback, and use that information to improve service delivery. These new hires will support cross-agency life experience projects, customer research, and service improvement activities at agencies considered High Impact Service Providers (HISPs),” reads a fact sheet on the CX initiatives supported by the budget request.

On top of this, the budget calls for funding to support seven new “Voice of Customer” programs across government. These programs would “collect and report experience performance data on key drivers of customer experience from a broad representation of Americans — which would drive meaningful service improvements,” the budget request summary explains.

The White House also wants to call on the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services team to work with six agencies on “priority” service improvement projects.

“The highly specialized customer experience and digital delivery talents at TTS provide flexible surge capacity for Federal agencies in their customer experience transformation. TTS will work with the highest-volume and highest-web-traffic Federal service providers to improve their website content, ensuring that information is clear and that services such as text messaging and virtual chat agents are more widely available,” the budget summary says.

With the more than $500 million requested, the White House hopes to also make individual investments in a variety of agencies to enhance important public services, such as airport security, federal retirement, passport delivery, paying taxes, visiting federal lands and a number of other key life experiences, for which the Biden administration recently created projects to transform.

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IRS Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer Ken Corbin said Tuesday that rolling out the technology had significantly improved customer experience for certain taxpayers by preventing them from having to spend hours on the phone when either filing their returns or seeking answers to questions.

“In the example of customer callback, we had to show that taxpayers in their journey, whether it was filing a return, or trying to get an answer … no one wants to sit on hold,” Corbin said. “We did offer callback technology last year — we did it for 5.7 million taxpayers — and we saved them 1.7 million hours of hold time.”

Corbin added: “Showing the leadership, showing everyone, the community, the stakeholders, that saving 1.7 million hours of hold time is a way to connect, it’s a way to show that matters.”

Details of the successful technology trial come as the Treasury Department continues to address a tax filing backlog and to hire new staff with $80 billion of fresh funding provided through the Inflation Reduction Act.

According to a report by the IRS taxpayer advocate, during fiscal 2021 just 11% of calls — or 32 million — were answered by a customer service representative.

Speaking at a customer experience summit hosted by trade group ACT-IAC, Corbin noted that the project had required close collaboration with the IRS’ operational teams and getting early buy-in from leadership.

Improving customer experience is high on federal agency technology leaders’ list of strategic priorities. It forms a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s President’s Management Agenda, which was published in its final form in September.

The PMA built on a customer experience executive order that was issued by the administration in December. This required federal agencies to place citizens’ user experience at the center of everything they do and to provide a “simple, seamless and secure customer experience” for citizens.

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At the time of the young man’s death in 2014, police departments did not release use of force data — basic information needed by federal officials to determine how Black communities were being affected by law enforcement violence — and led her to spearhead the novel Police Data Initiative.

The effort started with 14 police departments committing to opening at least three datasets — their use of force dataset almost always being one — and 129 jurisdictions were on board by the end of the Obama administration. Police and citizen expectations of what transparency and accountability should look like, and what data should be open, had changed, Ross told FedScoop in an exclusive interview.

“But we didn’t create a mechanism for turning that data into action, so that’s why I’m back.” Ross said. “Because open data is necessary and not sufficient to drive the type of action that we need to create a more equitable society.”

Ross was a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the time.

Now the U.S. chief data scientist since November, Ross’ focus has been ensuring the data agencies are using and publishing are yielding more equitable outcomes for Americans. And that requires the “next generation of open data” as she sees it: disaggregated data.

Disaggregated data is separated into smaller units, often demographically, to answer questions like which populations are underserved by federal programs and policies and make course corrections narrowing service gaps. The process is time intensive and necessitates skilled data practitioners, including career federal officials upskilled in data science, Ross said.

President Biden stressed his commitment to equitable data from his first day in office with the immediate issuance of the Racial Equity Executive Order in support of underserved communities. When the White House’s Equitable Data Working Group (EDWG), created by the order, released its five recommendations in April for improving use, normalizing disaggregated data while protecting privacy topped the list.

“Now everybody is talking about disaggregating data,” Ross said. “It used to be — I’ve been in this field for 20 years — I always avoided that word because it was so jargoney, and nobody knew what we were talking about.”

Still agencies are a “mixed bag” when it comes to collecting disaggregated data and using it properly, she added.

Bright spots include the Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy recently releasing a searchable catalog of disaggregated datasets on Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations, as well as agencies disaggregating grant data by location to ensure fairer distribution, Ross said.

The chief data scientist has spent the last 10 months building a small team within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy that supports the Biden administration’s biggest priorities like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) with $1.2 billion behind it, Inflation Reduction Act and Customer Experience Executive Order reducing barriers to government benefits. For the first time, a dedicated team is applying disaggregated data to a president’s policy agenda.

“What I do is infuse equitable data into those priorities, so data isn’t a side thing,” Ross said. “It’s actually integrated into how we design programs and policies.”

For that reason it’s important the team be a diverse mix of genders, races, ethnicities and lived experiences, she added.

Ross finds the biggest obstacle to the team’s work is its hybrid nature; there aren’t as many in-person interagency meetings or civic tech innovation summits for sharing best practices since the pandemic began.

“The collaboration tools that we have are just mostly not compatible,” Ross said. “And so we end up making the most of what we can with a PowerPoint and a Zoom call, but that’s a far cry from being in the same room with a bunch of post-it notes and really doing some solid design thinking using the best available tools.”

Ross assists with the hiring of data practitioners within agencies like the Office of Personnel Management’s surge team for the White House’s BIL implementation, which requires hundreds of STEM-trained personnel to support investments.

The chief data scientist’s team is responsible for operationalizing some of the recommendations of the White House Equitable Data Working Group (EDWG), which is transitioning into the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on Equitable Data. Ross will co-chair that subcommittee.

In addition to disaggregating data, the team is uncovering underused data; improving agencies’ capacity for policy and program equity assessments; creating public data visualization tools; and soliciting feedback from state, local, tribal and territorial communities. Some communities surpass the federal government when it comes to disaggregating data, which is why OSTP recently issued requests for information (RFIs) on LGBTQI+ equity and equitable data engagement and accountability on behalf of the new subcommittee.

“We’re really serious about these RFIs because we need the wisdom from the field in order to be able to implement these Equitable Data Working Group recommendations, in the most useful way, inside the federal government,” Ross said.

Other EDWG recommendations fall to the Office of Management and Budget and U.S. Chief Statistician Karin Orvis, who’s currently modernizing the 25-year-old Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (SPD 15) on race and ethnicity data standards. 

OMB recently released a plain-language recommendation to agencies for making the best use of existing race and ethnicity standards because the revised guidance isn’t expected until summer 2024. The recommendation includes practical flexibilities for disaggregating race and ethnicity data, approaches to data on more than one race, and advice on adding additional race categories to forms or surveys.

“I’ll just spoil that one,” Ross said. “You should not add some other race category to your forms or surveys because then it makes your data really unusable.”

OMB’s first listening session on the SPD 15 revision is slated for Sept. 15, 2022, and an RFI will be issued soon, Ross said.

The chief data scientist expects the update will have a ripple effect on how SLTT governments collect their own data with California already considering new race categories.

Ross will spend the rest of the year helping stand up the Working Group on Criminal Justice Statistics called for in May’s Policing and Criminal Justice Executive Order, harkening back to her work as a PIF, and ensuring her subcommittee hits the ground running.

“My priority for the rest of 2022 is to get these interagency collaborations going through the Subcommittee on Equitable Data,” Ross said. “That includes working on sexual orientation and gender identity data, infrastructure investment and equity assessments.”

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Traditionally the government has not necessarily associated “customers” as citizens. But, today’s focus on the “customer” of government promises to prioritize the citizen experience in navigating government services as opposed to just delivering services that check the box on paper.

The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) has a key focus area of “Delivering Excellent, Equitable, and Secure Federal Services and Customer Experience.” This was followed by the Executive Order (CX EO) on “Putting the Public First: Improving Customer Experience and Service Delivery for the American People.” This is more than a semantic change. This shift to “customer” allows for guidance to incorporate the experience that the federal workforce has with government technology and services. There is a direct correlation between employee experience and customer experience — happy employees deliver better service. A holistic look at how technology is used by all stakeholders is critical to achieving modernization and digitization goals.

Unlike implementing the guidance of cybersecurity mandates, delivering on the customer service goals does not require a huge financial investment. It does, however, mean making a more meaningful investment in culture change.

Agencies have the tools they need to improve customer experience, they just need to apply them in different ways.

Continuous Feedback

Some form of customer feedback is included in most projects today, but typically it is found in the very beginning stages of research and development. In keeping with the more iterative development of today’s IT solutions, user feedback needs to happen both early AND often.

Recently, an Army program came under scrutiny for not outlining how they would measure and assess soldier feedback to ensure the end-solution was actually meeting soldier standards. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) is the Army’s project to put navigation, intelligence, situational awareness and advanced target acquisition into the viewfinder of soldiers in the close fight. The Army argues they did user surveys and gathered input on designs, but a report from the Pentagon Inspector General says that does not go far enough to ensure the success of this $21B billion program.

This example has a well-defined user group and still faces questions as to if they did enough to understand their audience. For most agencies, their “customer” is much less homogeneous. How do you design for a customer when your customer is actually every United States citizen? Human-centered design approaches can make this seemingly impossible task possible by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. This means gathering users and those closest to the users together frequently to review the solution. This contrasts with today’s game of telephone where requirements managers are far removed from the actual users.

Get Beyond the Survey

Surveying users is incredibly important, but it is not the only way to implement human-centered design. In fact, after two years of incredible change in the workplace, many people are suffering from survey fatigue after having to answer questions about work-from-home needs, new policies and procedures, return to workplace readiness, and more. It is harder than ever to motivate respondents to focus on surveys. Additionally, in government, with the sheer audience size, it can take months to get the survey out and then analyzed. Then teams must ensure they have the budget and contract flexibility to make the changes that respondents might suggest. This works against the general premise of continuous feedback.

Instead, teams need to start fielding proof of concept solutions and minimally viable products sooner and more often. Then they must analyze the usage of those solutions to make real-time adjustments that will make an immediate impact on adoption. For example, a solution for expense reports may be resulting in those reports getting filed and paid — but looking at usage stats you may find it is taking a user four hours to get that process completed. Technically, the solution is working in accomplishing the overall task, but it is not efficient and adds to the “time tax” that the CX EO is looking to minimize across all government services. This insight can be gained at any point in the development and deployment of solutions without having to directly involve users in the feedback loop. It is human-centered, without involving the human.

Start at the Very Beginning

A focus on customer experience via human-centered design must be built into the procurement process, especially RFPs. The end-user is frequently missing from the requirements listed in proposals. Contracts can be on schedule, on budget, and meet “performance” metrics on paper — all while still delivering nothing of value to an actual user. Usability is not a key metric or KPI, but it needs to be.

Contracts should have specific criteria around engaging users as well as early findings as to what users are looking for. Contractors should be measured against these criteria. Contracts should make it clear that ad hoc user touch points are not enough. The project needs to document how user feedback is being incorporated. Changing the requirements to incorporate human-centered design and continuous user feedback will change how contractors (and which contractors) bid on work and then ultimately carry it out.

Contracts should cite usability and adoption goals beyond initial rollout. An investment in technology takes years to show return on investment so ensuring it is still used in five or even ten years should be criteria for any solution. A long-term adoption strategy should be a part of a procurement evaluation to ensure more austere use of technology investments across changing administration and leadership.

Making the Change

The PMA and the CX EO give agencies “permission” to make these changes – to become more iterative in their design of solutions and to mandate user input at multiple steps. Now is the time to look at agency policies and processes and see where they conflict with customer service goals and make changes. It is also time to really look at and understand who your customers are. The VA has done a great job of defining the veteran experience they want people to have and identifying the barriers for specific populations. All agencies need to take a similar look at the experience they want citizens and employees to have and use that as the top-level guidance in defining requirements for new solutions and services. These should be the milestones contracts are measured against, not the current focus on hitting per-year spending numbers and total contract years.

Making the shift to a customer experience focus will not be easy, but with executive mandates pushing for this direction, change will be easier to start. Starting with how we define the project and moving on to how we measure progress and success, the government can improve its user experience across its wide range of customers.

Riya Patel is managing director for Government at Dcode, a Washington, D.C., accelerator established to help nontraditional tech startups do business with government. Previously, Riya worked at the Defense Innovation Board, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, and within the Intelligence Community, and she earned her degree from Tufts University in international security and Russian language.

Billy Biggs currently leads the public sector team at WalkMe where he is responsible for sales leadership and operations for federal, state/local, higher education and non-profit customers. Previously, he held public sector leadership roles at BlackBerry, Cornerstone OnDemand, and GP Strategies Corporation.

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President Biden’s 2023 budget proposal, released Monday, requests a total of $65.8 billion for civilian IT spending, a significant increase over the estimated $58.4 billion spent in the current fiscal year.

According to White House data on IT spending, the 11% boost is the biggest in the past dozen years. The budget does not group defense IT funding or civilian grant spending with these numbers.

The large increase in civilian IT spending corresponds with the Biden administration’s top priority of enhancing and modernizing federal cybersecurity, spurred by last year’s cybersecurity executive order and the sweeping mandate for agencies to adopt zero-trust security frameworks. To support that, the White House is asking Congress for $10.9 billion for civilian cybersecurity spending. Last year, the president asked for about $1 billion less.

“Cyber threats have become a top risk to delivering critical Government services, and this Administration is committed to addressing root cause issues and taking transformational steps to modernize Federal cybersecurity,” the budget proposal says. It continues, “These investments will, in alignment with the Administration’s priorities, focus on addressing root cause structural issues, promoting stronger collaboration and coordination among Federal agencies, and addressing capability challenges that have impeded the Government’s technology vision.”

Since Biden issued his cybersecurity executive order in 2021 and subsequently the Office of Management and Budget released its corresponding strategy on moving agencies to zero trust, those mandates have gone largely unfunded. But this budget proposal “shows the Administration’s commitment to ensuring these requirements are implemented across the Federal Government,” the White House says.

The proposal calls for Congress to provide $2.5 billion of the greater cybersecurity budget to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), almost $500 million more than what it enacted for the agency last year, to support federalwide cybersecurity and network protection efforts.

In addition to the prioritized cybersecurity efforts, the $65.8 billion topline IT budget would also support the continued larger push for federal IT modernization — including a requested $300 million for the Technology Modernization Fund — the requirements set for in the recent customer experience executive order, ongoing federal data management efforts and plans to expand the federal IT workforce.

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The more agencies and people that GSA’s services, programs or projects touch, the better, the officials told FedScoop in an exclusive interview. Those efforts include the delivery of digital services supported by the agency’s Technology Transformation Services branch, as well as its administration of Technology Modernization Fund projects.

There’s “this real focus on shared services” in the executive order, said Dave Zvenyach, director of TTS. “It really mentions this idea of sort of the governmentwide approach. And one of the great things that’s called out in the executive order is building on some of the experience and work that we’ve done over the years around shared services,” he said, pointing to TTS programs like Login.gov, Search.gov and the U.S. Web Design System.

“We’re really thinking about how we can build on top of those strengths,” Zvenyach said.

While federal agencies face different mission sets, they often ultimately come back to serving the same people: the greater U.S. public. And the new executive order stresses that common customer to bring agencies closer in how they serve the public, he said.

“Ultimately, one of the things that we have recognized over the years, and we see this expressed in the executive order, is that it is all too easy for agencies to think about themselves and just sort of say, ‘Well, what does it mean for me?'” Zvenyach said. “As opposed to putting the user or the customer in the center of the work. And the executive order really pushes agencies to think about what the user need actually is and to put that squarely into the center.”

The Technology Modernization Fund, which has its program office housed in GSA, is taking a similar approach in seeking out modernization project proposals that provide the greatest benefit to the American public and across agencies.

By serving as this central clearinghouse of sorts for agencies looking for investments to support modernization, the TMF has the ability to follow trends from across government to “make the most impactful kind of strategic investments in government technology modernization as a whole,” said Raylene Yung, executive director of the TMF.

“We have this pretty unique bird’s eye view of what federal agencies are looking to modernize,” Yung said. “And so we’re kind of in this position to look across and say: ‘Wow, this is a common theme that we’re seeing, or, you know, maybe this investment actually might have a disproportionately large impact because it might benefit multiple agencies, or this is a shared problem that we think one solution in one place can benefit others.'”

At the same time, the TMF has been forced to find a way to do the most good from the investments it’s gotten based on an influx of demand. While the TMF saw a billion-dollar injection in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan Act — far surpassing what it had received in several years’ worth of fiscal appropriations prior to that — the response was staggering, with agencies submitting $2 billion across more than 100 proposals since last spring.

Before, that, “over the course of three years, the TMF maybe looked at a few dozen proposals and made 11 investments,” Yung said.

As an example of focusing on widespread impact, TMF Board last September made three different awards to agencies for zero-trust security projects, which the Biden administration has prioritized through its recent cybersecurity executive order. Rather than those agencies facing those projects independently, the TMF office created a cohort so they could work in lockstep.

“So all three agencies meet every other week. They talk, they exchange tips, they exchange information,” Yung said. “And that idea was TMF is not only giving each agency funding and an opportunity to accelerate their zero-trust journey, but now they can collaborate. And as a group, they can publish shared findings, and all other agencies doing the same things” can take advantage of that.

And Yung hopes to add more technical talent to the TMF team in the coming year “to support projects and investments through their full lifecycle.”

Yung, who joined GSA in September 2021, said these offices across the agency are “really feeding well together” to support cross-government, high-impact services by “thinking about opportunities to create these shared platforms and services and tools that work really well, for maybe all agencies or multiple agencies.”

After spending the past several years founding and leading the U.S. Digital Response — a nonprofit response organization designed to assist governments, mostly at the state and local level, and other organizations during crisis — Yung said this shared perspective also extends beyond the federal level of government: “What are those shared services that GSA can provide, that the federal government can provide that reach throughout all levels of government?”

‘Common vocabulary’

Ultimately, the new CX executive order not only gives agencies marching orders to improve customer services but also offers a blueprint and “common vocabulary” on how to execute, Zvenyach and Yung emphasized.

“There’s a reason beneath [the executive order], which is that we ultimately want policymakers to be able to confidently pass laws and regulations and have them actually get services delivered to folks,” Zvenyach said. “And we also want to make sure that when people interact with the government, it’s an opportunity to build trust and to build better experiences with the government.”

While the implementation of the executive order is a whole-of-government effort, GSA as a central service provider to other agencies is “really thinking about implementing the spirit and the practical day to day work around that customer experience executive order, really trying to focus on reducing burden and thinking about addressing the public’s needs when they’re interacting with government,” he said.

Yung added: “It’s kind of establishing that common language that agencies can use to say: ‘We need to make these websites more accessible, we need to think about the shared user experience, a life experience that touches multiple agencies.’ And so I think already, you can see that vocabulary kind of making it into strategic conversations and to goal setting and planning for appropriations for the next year and the following year.”

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