Citizen DX: Government customer experience starts with data
Properly managing and delivering citizen data should be the U.S. government's first CX priority.
I’m in the throes of supporting a family member with their federal government benefits. The experience has opened my eyes widely to the shortcomings and shortsightedness of the U.S. digital service and customer experience movements.
While much of the energy and resourcing has been around recruitment, hiring and making it easier for digital service teams to procure and deliver government services, the focus must now turn emphatically to data governance and interoperability. Without this, the pace of digital public service innovation will continue to be “bureaucracy,” no matter how much you try to hack it.
The CX and digital service efforts are commendable. How the federal government is beginning to deliver digital services has changed drastically over the past decade, and the top-down Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government shows there’s the requisite senior-level cultural understanding needed to facilitate true bureaucratic change.
Unfortunately, these efforts also deeply expose the silos of the federal bureaucracy, the lack of a strong collaboration ecosystem, and get at the core of why so many citizens are frustrated with the government experience.