[Music] okay so for our last session of the day we'll dive into the administration's customer executive order uh and how organizations can work to meet those goals outlined in the order by using process automation and analytics enhancing enterprise software delivery with low code development and revolutionizing the citizen experience please join me in welcoming our moderator jonathan album federal technology officer at servicenow robert brown chief technology officer for the u.s citizenship and immigration services barbara morton deputy chief veterans experienced officer at the va and pv chief executive officer at net impact strategies thank you thank you all right thanks hey do you need us [Music] nice wow vhs [Music] i'm going to get a lot of heckles all right well welcome everybody to our presentation on accelerating service delivery i think this is a great conversation to have to conclude our day at our fed forum we've had such a great experience being back in person and having these kinds of conversations about mission resiliency about the future of work digital acceleration we're bringing it all together in this final conversation as we focus on this idea of great customer experiences so i'm really excited to have our panel um and you know we we've been talking about the future work in hybrid and this is kind of our first hybrid panel with our um with one of our panelists barbara morton remotely so we're going to see how the technology works and i'm completely optimistic that it's going to be fantastic and it's going to work great so i want to go ahead and have our panelists give a brief introduction and explain their roles in their organizations and some of the things that they've been doing around customer experience we're going to start with with barbara so welcome barbara hello everybody it's great to be with you although i'm missing a party clearly with all the hoots and haulers from the crowd so but happy to be with you virtually um so barbara morton i am va's deputy chief veterans experience officer my responsibility entails hardwiring customer experience best practices service design and delivery across the organization for better outcomes and impacts and access for veterans their families caregivers and survivors and super honored to be with you all today thank you barbara rob yeah thanks for having me i appreciate it uh at dhs uscis um i kind of i feel like i'm the chief nerd a little bit um or sometimes the low nerd depending upon what we're talking about uh it's from stitching together cx ux to turning some screws and actually doing some integration and connecting data so trying to be a part of all of it and as well as like not just theorizing but also actually doing some development making it practical absolutely and last but not least thank you jonathan i'm ceo of net impact strategies shout out to our team in orange there [Applause] we are a managed strategy management consulting and software company we're building solutions that are repeatable reusable for agencies as part of a product strategy services strategy as a matter of fact by the end of this month will be the largest federal independent software vendor but we want to solve the customer experience problems one time for the agencies to be able to leverage very quickly so excited to be here thank you for having me well we're we're we're we are excited to have all of you here uh for this conversation i just got to say when i when i saw that this was the last uh presentation of the day would there be anybody here the fact that there's so many people here and rob brought a cheering section pv brought people in jackets i mean my my day is my day is made but we're going to start with barbara barbara you know at the va there's so many different kinds of services from delivery of care benefits cemeteries there is a tremendous database on our veterans so to make all of this work and to provide great customer experience and we've taken a human-centered design approach and i was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and maybe describe some of the results that you've gotten from this kind of approach to doing your customer experience work yeah absolutely so i always like to sort of start a little bit from the beginning of our journey here in the veterans experience office and as some of you may know our office was stood up as a sort of a response to what i call a catalyst it really was sort of a crisis back in 2014 where veterans were waiting um long periods of time for their health care at the phoenix va medical center and that was really sort of a wake-up call for us i think in va to sort of think differently about how we deliver services um you know particularly starting with health care and so what we did is after the office was stood up we knew we wanted to sort of test and prove the concept of what a great experience particularly in the patient space would look like and so of course we started with human centered design and our our first ever sort of business line journey map exploring what is the patient experience with with va from scheduling an appointment to arriving to consultation and sort of next steps and so we interviewed hundreds of veterans from across the country different ages demographics locations and really captured moments that mattered most to them and thought to ourselves okay how might we operationalize changes based on moments that matter and i'd love to give a quick very low tech example of that so one of the the moments that mattered that we found from our hcd research in the healthcare experience journey was ease of navigation of a medical center and the thing that i find fascinating about that is that ease of navigation probably would never naturally appear on a medical center director's operational dashboard right there probably the number of appointments scheduled number of surgeries conducted etc and so the power for us of experience was to be able to elevate this moment that mattered to patients about navigating a va medical center so we worked with the veterans health administration early adopter of this movement really a patient experience in building this capability and some medical centers had already established sort of an ambassador greeter program so what we did is we worked with them to brand it it's called the red code ambassador program and then scale it across the system so veterans would have that consistent experience of a warm welcome and a greeter in a branded identifiable sort of uh coat to help them navigate the facility and so we didn't stop there you asked about impact we wanted to understand what is the impact of actually operationalizing insights into action and so with our customer experience patient experience surveys we've added a question regarding ease of navigation and since our first launch of this at scale the agreement with ease of navigation has increased by four percentage points so again very evidence-based when you respond to the customer you always every time will produce better results for them and that just instantly sets them up for a positive experience during that moment that matters which is a great term and i think one that's really essential to the um to the president's executive order on customer experience you know the the eo um on cx states that you know we have to use technology to modernize the government implement services that are simple to use and accessible i want to turn to rob and um you know we note that you know the the cx is a part of the pma we heard about it this morning during um during the keynote so you know can you talk a little bit uh about the way you're implementing cx at uscis sure i guess you know there's the basic blocking and tackling as it relates to just general software delivery what we're doing today i feel you know we're pretty fortunate enough to at uscis and dhs that we actually have a great skilled staff um people that are pretty motivated and understand that this is important um i would say that a lot of this has to do with the mission and it's a great mission um yet we we do have the basic blocking tackling of you know what how do we actually get cx how do we get human or user center design into the actual development process um that's first and foremost some of the some of the things that we've done to to bolster this and provide and abate some of the rogues that happens and at least make it front and center is um to actually start to hire the right people and make sure that we have good classified position descriptions so that we can hire bodies with that talent into the into the government it's not just a security specialist or a whatever 2210 these folks can now actually you know hold their head high and we've got them classified appropriately um and then there's some of the artifacts that come out of that we've spent the last probably two years developing after a lot of research a good design system based upon what already exists today and actually tailored it for usas and hopefully it's a model for the rest of dhs if we're lucky um there's there's also other artifacts you know just doing a lot of cross pollination building the coe amongst the community of of designers uh that are thinking about this day in and day out and starting to also develop a good research base that the entire organization as well as others within dhs or even within the uh the federal community can reuse based upon similar sort of experiences that we present and have with with our customer base and you know you're meeting people during a very challenging time in their lives potentially so you have these natural challenges as barbara described too you're seeking care you're seeking you know some kind of outcome through the immigration process the last thing you need is a complicated technology system to have to interact with so that empathy that you were both describing i think is is really important and you know pd as we think broadly across government um you know requirements come in all shapes and sizes we have immigration we have healthcare i worked at usda farmers and ranchers are very different you know every agency has these unique kinds of challenges so you know what i want to ask you with you know your years of experience on technology different companies what are the skill sets that you think agencies need to be able to implement these kinds of technologies and take these kinds of new approaches to serving their customers that's really an interesting question um i think part of what we're not leveraging is the power of the broader audience that has the mission experience within the agencies make the technology work for them right obviously we need to have skill sets um technical skill sets like cloud cyber so on and so forth what uh rob is describing is he set up an integrated uh platform on which people can innovate on top of to accelerate this delivery so it is taking that business analyst or mission analyst that understand the context of what we need to do to enable service delivery acceleration and yeah teaching them it's no code environment on top of this integrated platform i think that's a big skill set that i think connecting people who understand the mission people understand technology and ideally helping people who understand the mission no technology people who know technology know the mission now you have this amazing intersection of people who can do really tremendous things and you know uh being able to see the mission in action i always felt was very important right you know see a veteran see a farmer see see the immigration process and um you know it doesn't take a technology skill set to do it takes just takes the willingness you know we heard about this morning so we don't need to build our environment around big modernization all the time obviously you need professional developers you need full stack developers you need cyber experts but we can solve problems on top of a modern platform like a service now and build uh workflows build process flows and build modernization capabilities incrementally and that's consistent with i think what rob is doing right no absolutely i mean you know all of that undifferentiated heavy lifting is gone um because it's already been taken care of now i just put the the mission-oriented folks that have you know some technology skills and those skills or can as they enter in our workforce today are continuing to rise as well as just curious minds now we can actually enable them and we're seeing that enablement in various formats plus with the right standards and governance in place we're abating you know just i was saying this earlier we are abating the 15 random rogue applications that are being developed across the board without security in mind without data standards in mind so now with that right platform with the right standards with the right governance the right easy pathway we enable folks to abate essentially the old way of doing business i don't need a devsecops team anymore at all i don't need to have all of these other folks bolted in um it's straight to straight to the individual right when you have those kinds of very complex environments one there's risk in there but you also it's also emblematic of i design these systems based on what i need as the cio or the government program manager i didn't design it from the customer's perspective it's very kind of inside of government out to the public approach and what you're talking about is very outside in you know what is the veteran need what is the farmer need what is the uh what is the person in the immigration process need and when you think about it that way you can abate all those systems and it's building on that um barbara uh i've heard you express uh in the past that veterans have had some consistent challenges navigating va systems and you know how would you um how would you say va is doing about alleviating this and making it simpler for people again people in need people who need something to get what they need simply and effectively yeah absolutely so i love this conversation because one of the things that we wanted to do early on was bring on in-house designers human-centered design specialists when we first stood up this office back in 2015 2016 and there were no pds that were classified for for that talent fast forward to where we are today and to your point we actually have our you know va's first ever chief design officer in our shop and a whole team of federal employees who are cx strategists and design specialists what that does is it enables us to deeply understand the culture to know how to navigate government and sort of infuse our decision making and our prioritization with the voice of the veteran and veteran needs so to your question about navigation that is a recurring pain point and so i kind of give a gave a low tech example of how we've empowered our employees with tools through the redcoat ambassador program to actually deliver vet experiences a high-tech example is va.gov and i love to tell this story because it really kind of shows our evolution you know using the customer voice to inform strategic decision making so back in 2018 or so we really kind of want as a department wanted to tackle this head-on and at the time we had lots of different web properties out there we had va.gov we had vets.gov we had ebenefits we had my healthy vet lots of different properties and we thought to ourselves why don't we ask veterans if they wanted to have a single digital front door which one of these brands or properties would they orient to and they came back to us and they said you know va.gov it's a strong brand that is where we would go if we don't know where to go to help us navigate va so that was the first time in my recollection that a secretary-level department-level strategic decision was made to actually designate va.gov is va's front door digital entry which is fantastic but we didn't stop there of course we redesigned in the entire website so what you would have seen you know pre-2018 was a very bureaucratic looking and i say that with love in my heart always but very bureaucratic looking website with announcements about the president's budget now do we know that our customers care about that or don't care about that of course they're not interested in that they really want to get to business with va and so working in close partnership with our chief technology officer and his team we applied human center design to co-design and re-release relaunch the website top transactions up front integrated profile login opportunity really making it seamless for veterans to transact with us and i'll just add one more comment too yeah go ahead go ahead well i do what are the underlying technologies you use and how what sort of process automations are are are in there so we so veo we sponsor a lot of the back end data systems integration so that is enabling that sort of integrated profile on va.gov but really this is sort of you know the brainchild and built and co-designed with veterans and i was going to mention the mobile app too so va's first ever mobile app has been in soft launch the last few months and that is again real-time co-designed with veterans to kind of create a very easy way to transact with the department so we are really seeping in this methodology deep deep into the organization and the results have sort of spoken for themselves so the before and after we relaunched va.gov veteran satisfaction with use of the website increased by over 20 percent so another great evidence-based use case for why design and you can note exactly the kinds of improvements your technology created having that baseline and you know being able to tell that uh that validating the value you know of the work is so huge and that creates more opportunities i think for for additional kinds of uh automations and other digital transformation activities and you know pv coming back back to you um i'm wondering what kinds of examples of automation you've seen elsewhere in government we talk a lot about hyper automation at servicenow we've talked about end to end digital workflows you know these things have a real value i'm curious how you've seen it deployed it's really interesting it's really interesting if you read the executive order it cites nine billion hours spent filling paper a a time tax yes i think it's one of the terms they use right so if you kind of think about digital technologies digital interactions that could be order of magnitude cut down so there are a lot of opportunities i think we're handling big modernizations on benefits like veterans benefits or cis benefits but there are a lot of citizen interactions as well as within the government i think with the workflows so people are using very successfully take a pdf type legacy you know not just process automation it doesn't really help if you have taken a pdf and put it digital and run it like an analog process right modernize a modernized process so that a lot is happening within the mission with the mission workflow automation for example every agency does some kind of case management you may not call it case management so to be able to modernize whether it's a benefits veterans benefits or a case as it related to cis or ice etc etc so there's a lot of lot of opportunity that is opening up to free up the time you would have otherwise spent running that process to innovate more to educate more of the business analysts i was talking about getting people back to the high value right you know moving on for the low value stuff that took time and then a lot of stuff on the it management side that we do as a process that i think agencies are modernizing and automating uh for example uh just simple thing like asset auditing that we do on assets that we shoot the government issues annually you have to do that it doesn't have to be you know we don't need to send field service reps to go scan and do that give it do it yourself kind of things to onboarding i think employee onboarding right is something that we don't necessarily do a good job even though we have systems we still do emails contract onboarding is a is a significant decision and contract or upboarding is an issue from my experience and you know people i like the fact that you sort of transition from employee uh to to employee experiences because you know we're talking about accelerating service delivery from you know an agency's perspective service delivery is uh inclusive of those employee experiences in addition to the customer experiences we talked about and you know rob i'm curious from your perspective how um you you think about employee experience at uscis what kinds of things are you doing to make it easier for your colleagues to serve people going through that immigration process have the tools they need we've you know big push for uscis is backlog reduction and how do we deal with backlog reduction we've talked about automation we've talked about cx for typically the the public or non-public looking for x a benefit but how do we deal with our own internal challenges we've talked a little bit about you know how we get this pdf now what do we do so and we've got a large effort right now of just we just pure digitization of warehouses uh filled with paper so intelligent document processing is very big um and so what do you do that's great to scan it and run ocr in it run some nlp on it throw it in a data lake and run some analytics wonderful how does that help my colleagues how does it help the adjudicators so they can do their job faster or automate the nonsense or bs that's actually in their job so uh taking that sort of that approach and if i can like that's great to do all these wonderful things with with that data and apply some machine learning and some ai but how do i really make it useful for that adjudicator or for some risk and fraud officer so taking an approach of doing sort of generative actual workflows using using cxux principles using generic research but actually moving that to the beginning of the process as opposed to throughout or at the end and then if i can apply the folks that actually i'm actually researching to then take that same skill set and apply to those processes into that technology now i've just empowered them to actually be front and center and then what that means is i can do all of this pre-processing as an actual individual or customer um is actually applying the benefit meaning that that backlog can then be reduced dramatically because i'm taking all that work right as far again to the left um plenty of other areas to talk about well i i think what's interesting to me about what you said is you know the customer is all based on you know your perspective and where you sit so cx we say customer experience well if you're serving employees of your agency they are your customers and applying these same principles like you just said creates an employee experience that's very different to what people have uh experienced before and the less complicated it is to do their job the more engaged they are i had an opportunity to meet with another agency's i.t leadership team earlier and we're talking about what it takes to onboard employees to serve those agencies customers and many of those agency employees leave after a short period of time because the systems don't support effective working the systems are hard to use uh and it takes long to learn them so you know people want to work with technologies in their work life that are very similar to the technologies in there in their home life and yeah i mean right now it's there's plenty of experiences another big one for us is the developer experience and that can be applicable to an employee how do we make sure that they if we talk about onboarding some of our arm boarding can take a month just for a developer to know where north is yeah uh so that becomes really important just for general efficiencies yeah so the importance of the work rob and the team has been doing as a former customer of a predecessor organization ins i can tell you my my customer experience but recently one of our family member applied for a green card had the benefit of having transparency of the entire process 30 plus years ago when i applied for a green card must have been 15 and a half at that time maybe young young person so there was no web so you didn't know how to apply so you went to a lawyer well i could afford a lawyer and i said i'll do it myself i was in philadelphia at the time go to ins office realize that well you can go to the office you have to stand in the line at four o'clock come back next day i get a form i ask that officer what do i do next and he said well we'll tell you so it kind of felt like a spy thriller what do i do next meet me at the paris train station on platform number seven we'll tell you what it is and i had 14 visits that i had to make that interaction and it changes uh over a period of three and a half years with this work is so meaningful for people it impacts and you know we have long ways to go but i really appreciate it it makes a difference about how you feel about the government you know how you feel about your experience and it's one of the tenets of the executive order that we've been we've been talking about today if i can create great experiences for people interacting with the government i can change the way they think about government and i can slowly build trust and that's one of the most important things that i think we have the opportunity to do as i t leaders in in the federal government barbara i can't help but see you dotting your head and smiling i'm curious if you there's a comment you want to make on this on this topic well i i mean absolutely i mean this this whole movement around customer experience employee experience i mean this is this is a key recruitment tool right i mean for this next generation of energized creative vibrant public servants thinking about how to do government differently and again grounding us in why we're all here which is for the people not the bureaucracy first for the people first it's just it's it's so far-reaching and so inspiring and i just i'm so thrilled that we're all kind of part of this orbit together and creating um this ecosystem that is actually really really appealing for folks to step into in a totally different way we only have a few minutes left but barbara i was hoping you could help us uh conclude our conversation with one or two best practices or some advice for the audience people who are doing the same kind of work where they get started what have you what's a lesson learned that you want to share i mean i think there are a couple of things i mean for us in va we've been very fortunate year over year administration over administration to bridge the importance and urgency of customer experience and employee experience as well so i think having the highest level of leadership support is critical and thankfully we have an incredible cxeo to help lead the way and guide the way which is amazing um the second thing i would say is always start with a journey map whether it's a macro problem or a macro issue that you want to understand or it's a very specific drill down um some part of a business line always start with sort of orienting around human-centered design research and a journey map and then the third thing i would say is we put together last year the customer experience cookbook and this is really sort of a an opus for our brothers and sisters across agencies to really understand how they in their culture and their agency and their organization can use these mechanisms ingredients lovers and government to build and mature a cx capability well thank you barbara those are great advice i really like the idea of doing that journey map thinking about the the workflow how the data flows if you don't know that for your processes or your agency it's very hard to innovate it's very hard to improve and who knows if you're even improving something that is working right you know so so i think that's great advice really sort of grounds uh grounds your work and next steps uh rob final final thoughts lessons learned things you want to share yeah i think first it's just understanding who your customers are as we've already talked about i'd be remiss if i didn't say that we haven't talked about it but our business partners is also really important it's great about the american public we're here to serve and develop trust and give them the right data it's also very important to you know work with our business partners um so ensuring you understand who they are what they need and addressing that can be you know maybe just as important yeah um so i was gonna say note the customer experience executive order has a definition for customer and it's citizens it's other agencies it's businesses it's non-profits it's other governments so you're absolutely right you know think about who that customer is and like we talked about before sometimes the customer is your employee yeah it could be my buddy sitting behind me yeah so yeah i have to have expansive view of this seemingly simple word right so if i can the other and this is a little if i can nerd out a little bit please please if you guys don't mind okay sorry i'll be quick um i think another just from lessons learned i think it's very important to actually do the research and what's really important is workflows and if you can actually bundle and catalog those workflows using that generative research framework it'll save you a lot of time a lot of time and whatever you develop even if it's an older antiquated way of developing or on a loco no code platform thank you rob pb bring us home i think it's um pull it all together i think doing a better change management across the cultural change that is happening with the eo is that customer experience is important delighting citizens delighting internal customers so do a a better job of managing the change as a best practice and measuring that change using commercial b2c kind of approaches like net promoter score we're only delighting customers matter and not keeping them satisfied like passive doesn't really matter i think that whole change spectrum focusing on that just as much of the actual technology i think is you know sometimes that change management requires you to slow down a little bit right if you go too fast you can miss those create some blind spots and miss things like that so i think that you know we have some great ideas on how we can all move forward as a federal i.t community whether it's it's journey mapping whether it's thinking about change management or really identifying that that customer you're doing those things i i feel based on my experience you're going to get good results and you know those are the things that are needed if we're going to accelerate service delivery if we're going to live up to the promises that we talked about today as a as a federal community and provide services to the people that need them and you know with that i want to i want to conclude and just say thank you to rob pb and barbara i am so glad the technology worked thank you i'm glad you're able to be here and turn things back over to steve walters thanks guys thanks everyone [Music]