IT modernization is one of the most significant federal technology objectives of 2018, with the White House fully behind enablement of legacy IT networks and systems in order to adopt cloud and shared digital services. The first step is the launch of “Centers of Excellence,” or CoEs, to help federal agencies implement the Trump administration’s recommendations for IT modernization, and themselves become far more customer-focused organizations, ready for digital customer/constituent engagement. (https://fcw.com/articles/2017/12/22/it-modernization-coes.aspx )
The scope of these CoEs include cloud adoption, IT infrastructure optimization, customer experience, service delivery analytics and contact centers. In other words, CoEs offer guidance on how to achieve the promise of “digital transformation” using cloud services, modernizing legacy infrastructure, focusing on better customer experience in government web or direct transactions, and rapidly measuring outcomes from a customer service delivery perspective.
Coordinated, integrated improvement across all these areas represents the pillars on which public sector missions can most effectively deliver services. These form the building blocks of measurable, efficient and democratized digital constituent engagement – thereby treating constituents as customers. That’s what “digital transformation” produces.
How does this work then for agencies, leveraging the benefits of these CoEs to actually create digital customer engagement that fulfills both agency objectives and citizen expectations?
Step 1
The first step is to come up with a strategy, a framework for agency-specific digital customer engagement – as an agency imperative. Such a framework or “playbook” represents the requirements for and dependencies on digital services. This is a business plan for government – not unlike a commercial sales and marketing plan. It identifies and targets the audiences, creates the processes, organization model and governance structure for digital engagement, identifies the IT services and critical resources required, plus designs how audience response and conversions will be tracked and evaluated for success. What truly are the products and services “sold”, and who’s buying. How to roll out the business plan, where to start, and how to test it.
This also results in critical agency investment guidance, including the right balance of industry vs. internal help and capabilities required. What investments right now are essential for the government to produce internally, vs. those which should be outsourced or purchased 3rd-party. For example, managing constituent relationships is an agency responsibility, but building analytics and CRM tools, executing SEO or digital ad campaigns and producing branded digital content are typically not critical, advanced skills developed in-house.
Therefore, creation of this kind of Digital Customer Engagement Playbook is what each agency needs to do, to actually benefit from the shared services the White House IT Modernization CoEs promise (or create similar, agency-specific digital services). Not only to use each of these shared services and knowledge domains, but to actually properly tailor and orchestrate them to support mission-specific digital customer engagement.
This is in fact an emerging initiative among the most forward-thinking agencies – contact us directly for more information, and ask us how we’re doing this with our partners already within government today.