“Nico Papafil, director of the General Services Administration’s 10x program, said the program will fund more such ideas than ever before in fiscal 2022. 10x crowdsources ideas from federal employees and turns them into shared services.
‘We’re just asking the question, ‘what problems [are you] trying to solve?’ And we actually added these investment themes to kind of create some guidelines that just show where we want to add weight for the types of ideas we want to select,’ Papafil said during an Oct. 21 GovernmentCIO webinar. ‘And we talked about how do we help the public engage better with the government? That’s one of the themes. And we want to double down on last year’s themes about climate change, and how do we improve digital services around the climate space? And the last one is equity and delivery. How are we better, as a government, providing a more equitable service to underserved and underpopulated and underrepresented communities? And so those are the themes that we’re going to be looking at.’…”
”It’s essentially the next step in the evolution of human centered design from what Barbara Morton, deputy chief veterans experience officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the VA did back in 2018…”
“’So if you had seen VA.gov a number of years ago, it would have looked very bureaucratic. And I say that with love in my heart, but it was designed from the inside out. It kind of looked like an org structure containing information that probably veterans and their families don’t really care about,’ Morton said. ‘So we went back… in partnership with the chief technology officer and other siblings across VA, we redesigned it using human centered design. So when you see it today, you will see a much more user friendly website. Top transactions are up front, and we are codesigning and iterating all along the way with users.’
This exemplifies a point Papafil made, saying that agencies each have their own missions and customer base, and they’re all concerned with serving those customers. But that creates silos that are difficult for citizens to navigate. So he helped found 10x specifically with the purpose of leveraging GSA’s assets to create cross-government shared services with human centered designs in order to knock down those silos and streamline the customer experience…” Read the full article here.
Source: GSA’s 10x program crowdsourcing new customer experience ideas – By David Thornton, October 22, 2021. Federal News Network.
