my name is adam mazmanian i'm the executive editor of fcw and i'm here to moderate our first panel discussion on how the cx executive order changes things one of the things if you remember cindy lauper money changes everything there's a lot of money now going into cx by the technology modernization fund and that's going to be a big topic so let me introduce our panel um we have uh jesse posilkin she's the customer experience portfolio lead at the technology modernization fund um on the end jonathan album the cto of servicenow federal cto uh the federal cto and principal digital strategist at servicenow and someone i remember as the cio of uh the u.s department of agriculture for a number of years um and steve buberski uh business development executive uh genesis and i'm hoping that uh we can just have a quick introductions from people and i'll start with uh jesse just you know what you do and how you work touches on cx sure uh hi all i'm jesse pasulkin i oh there we go uh i'm in my first in-person moment in a long time um and i lead the customer experience portfolio at the general services administration and that that includes both looking at proposals that come in managing the proposals and investments that we have and trying to make sure that we're making the most strategic investments possible um pardon me my name is stephen buberski i do business development for genesis we are a customer experience software cloud company with digital and artificial intelligence my role is strategic in nature as well it's sort of the guide the portfolio towards the needs of the public sector do some evangelism and most importantly make sure that people understand that we're here to help jonathan so great to see everybody um great to be in person see so many familiar faces so jonathan albaum i'm the federal cto for servicenow and in in my role i work with our teams that uh work with government agencies to really help them connect the the problems of government to the problems that servicenow is very good at solving and you know we we have servicenow we're very good at connecting people and systems and organizations using the servicenow platform a lot of people know us as a tool for i.t service management but it's a lot more than that it's about a fundamental uh platform to connect things and when you apply that to customer experience you're connecting people and giving them you know great experiences and it really changes how they how they think about government so really interested in having this conversation today looking forward to it great um well i wanted to start by talking to you jesse about um last week it was announced that the technology modernization fund was going to kind of earmark or reserve 100 million dollars for cx projects so how does that dedicated funding affect implementation of this of the eo and i guess i want to hear a little bit about what kind of projects you're looking for yeah great so um i to me this feels just like a huge opportunity for government that we have this kind of funding to improve customer experience in this moment our our expectation and hope is that we are going to be looking for projects that make real impact that are both any any agency can apply but just as been as has been called out in the cxeo high impact service providers which are the agencies that are really serving the largest volume of transactions are certainly ones that we have our eye on here and i'm looking for we heard one of the speakers earlier mentioned this we're looking for for projects that are really rooted in that customer journey and making it better looking for the moments where both the public and government workers are able to have a better experience and i think that's important to call out both there are times that federal workers may be really frustrated with the systems they're using they may be slow they may be clunky and that that impacts the customer and the public even if it's not directly a public facing system and i think calling that out we i saw recently a proposal from an agency where they were reducing a form from from 20 pages down to two and in in doing that and that kind of work that's not just something that's good for the public though it is and will significantly improve the particular outcomes for that agency but also will make a really big difference for the staff who are tired of dealing with a 20-page form that's duplicative and doesn't give them the information they need and the agency partners that that they work with who might be sharing data and it's much easier to share smaller amounts of data that are really specific um so in terms of the kinds of projects we're looking for i'm also looking for for projects that are cross-agency where they're they're really important efficiencies that can be found in both reducing that public burden and then reducing the burden across and then just uh i wanted to ask how do projects come to you do they come are they sort of agencies come and say we would like to do this do they come sort of packaged with vendors or technology they want to implement and then what's the board's role in kind of assessing you know workshopping them and and do the projects sort of change like in flux as you know from the submission to the final final version yeah they change a little bit um so we're looking given the scale that we're talking about 100 million dollars we're not talking about small hundred thousand dollar pilots at this point we're talking about projects that we know and that agencies know they've maybe already done a pilot or they've already done some user research that has helped them understand hey we we do have some of the personas and the kinds of people that we want to help so we're talking about a little bit farther along the process at which point there's probably not like opportunity for a huge pivot um but we are in very close conversation and i and a couple of the other leads at the tmf we've only been around for the past four months so this has been relatively new that we as a program management office are able to dedicate this kind of support to agencies so we now have a new form i know one of the big frustrations earlier was just how how what a bad customer experience it was um and so now we on our website for cx proposals have a small form that you can fill out just to begin to workshop an idea with us and see hey is this worth moving forward is this worth getting vendor partners on board it's for government employees only to fill out but but we understand and often agencies are coming to us either with a procurement strategy already in place or an explanation of where they're going so sometimes there are vendor partners at the table and the kind of projects you're bringing in and we're not talking about like four billion dollars for a financial systems overhaul um there's it seems to me like there's a lot of impact you can do with relatively small dollars in this space i'm hoping you can expand on that a little bit absolutely um i know we we have two recent um awards that i'm thinking about one was for uh nara which i'm blanking on the dollar amount now that i'm up here with the lights but it was a not a huge dollar value relatively speaking and really was going to make a very significant difference um in the ability of veterans in particular to access their records which has all kinds of ramifications down the line for people accessing benefits uh survivors benefit varieties of things that are really important so that's one i think we're also you're talking about paperwork but that paperwork has really important implications along the way and the other which is extra wonky but we're in washington so i'll do it as the postal regulatory commission they're tiny um and they they needed two million dollars to make some pretty significant upgrades so that the regulation of our postal service like pretty core service in this country is secure and safe and i think those kinds of cyber security investments are also just important where you're looking at how do we make things safe um that and that that has really significant public impact this is a great uh sort of point to bring in other panelists so let's talk a little bit about the value proposition here you know that that what you can really get for uh for for relatively small investments well you know there's there are there are a number of ways you can approach it right so you could do kind of like an inside out approach or an outside interpreter so first of all you can look at technology simply as an enabler right which is um i'm going to augment what i have so perhaps i have uh you know a call burden so i want to reduce that call burden with self-service and ai artificial intelligence so you're supplementing what you have you're you're adding to it um another opportunities you may have to transform sometimes uh you're looking at adding something like journey mapping as as an opportunity to enhance the service um they all require a great deal of money because you're supplementing what you have or you're augmenting it's not a swap or a lifted shift right so the important thing that we believe in is is focusing on delivering empathy at scale and how we do that is to focus on that journey mapping and some of the other opportunities to change the experience for both sides of the equation you hit it on it earlier it's always better to have both ends satisfied right so when you do a transformative project large or small you want to make sure you focus on um enhancing the experience for the agent and and the customer because that's a concentric spiral of benefits right you know it continues to bear fruit as it goes call times go down agents are happier to be involved retention is better training goes up and then call times continue to go down you have money to invest in other projects so um taking a small look at a very critical piece making that investment often yields long-term benefits that's that's really fun adam i would just add that i think part of the opportunity right now is to change the way we think about the systems we develop and the capabilities we offer you know i spent a lot of time in government um before joining servicenow and built a lot of systems and you know i spent my career building systems in support of a government program and that program wanted it a certain way and you know we would meet the requirements uh and we would do that across the agencies and you'd have a lot of individual very good systems that didn't always connect as well as they could sometimes dealt with the same person in different ways and we weren't really thinking about the experience of the person who might be coming to the department of agriculture say or any individual agency and how they experience those individual systems we thought about it really from the inside out and changing that perspective to outside and thinking about that person it's more of a human centered approach you know that is we've been talking about human centered design for a long time but i think the eo puts it in a context of an individual trying to interact with the government and as jesse noted multi multiple agencies come together to serve a single person during a critical point and the idea that we can build systems and think about the data and think about someone's interaction with one or more agencies and sometimes one or more programs inside that same agency at the same time in design with that in mind that is a fundamental change to how we've traditionally done things it's not immediately started with eu it's been sort of building but the eo really crystallizes it and with some dollars behind it i think we'll get great examples that become really inspirational kinds of uh achievements that other agencies can build around say hey i want to do that too for the employees that work here and as people interact with government in some places and they have that they're going to expect that everywhere well and i think that's not a really important point right which is you know everybody wants to transform they know what that means right so um transformation is an opportunity to do something different and it's how you look at it so a lot of folks in the federal government have a tendency to let's take what we have let's move i want to move to the cloud that's a typical initiative right we'll save money go to the cloud but they tend to take what they have and move it and then they want to look at transformation later and it's really important if you take the approach jonathan's talking about right now which is to rethink how you're how you're examining what you're doing what your mission is and how you're going to deliver it you have an opportunity to transform rather than transitions yeah you can move everything you have to the cloud but in many cases some of the things you're doing you can only have done that that way with the technology you have at your disposal it's the only way you can do it you don't need to repeat that anymore you don't have to capture you don't have to retain it it's time it's an opportunity to transform and really take a look at how you can you know change what you're doing on both sides of the equation sometimes it's technology sometimes it's personnel but there's always an opportunity transformation is really um i think it's a misused word but it's really important part and your approach as you define it i think is probably one of the most effective one of the pieces of uh you mentioned interacting with different agencies uh you may be one person to like one component at the usda you may be another have another identity with another component digital identity is such a huge uh sort of hurdle to get over when it comes to creating a good customer experience and i wanted to start maybe with you jonathan sure you know there's a kind of a thirty thousand foot view uh where where do you where do you see the cx the executive order driving to when it comes to digital identity identities core to those light uh those cross-agency experiences and you know there's um you know sometimes as consumers and we're customers of government we we expect the same kind of service from our private sector counterparts and we expect that from from government but we have sometimes an unwillingness to allow government to manage data in the same kind of way you know we freely give up a lot of information at google and apple and amazon all the time and we get these you know really great consumer experiences you have to be willing to do that same thing with government in order to get that same cross-agency experience and the government has a lot of data about about all of us but it's really segmented right now sometimes by design and sometimes by law so i think the question about identity and how do i log into a system and am i the same jonathan across all these systems in all these programs i i've always felt like i should have the opportunity to opt in to have that singular uh login experience and be able to have that usa.gov kind of portal and have all of my information in one place and make it very easy for me but i fully recognize that not everybody might be there with the government and and that's okay but if you want to opt in you should be able to to to opt in we need you know the technology exists to do that right because we see it you know in our in our commercial lives uh applying it effectively in government is is an important um conversation for us to have and jesse this is a big part of what uh gsa is doing with login.gov yeah so i i um i can't help but say like i i hear you and um i think it's also really important as we think about human-centered design to to not just know that it's about opting in but about doing the research to see that it it gets pretty complicated the different kinds of ways that people need to interact with the government can vary pretty widely and that is you know as we saw during the beginning of kovid some people do need not just the agencies but also people need to be able to come in in real life to do that kind of in-person identity verification and so being able to now have something like login.gov which is expanding to to meet these needs i think is really important so that you know now i know there's a pilot with the department of labor um with unemployment um in order to see if there are ways that this can that you can combine that online experience with the offline one that's so critical and what kind of services does that drive you know when you when you have this is up for the for anyone um when you have that sort of like single sign-in or or something like it in play well i think what you want is for it to be easy to access the thing that you need to get to not that you need to necessarily get to everything at once like that question is i'm not i'm not making a statement on that necessarily like but it's a more complicated one um and and so in my mind login.gov is what makes it easy to be able to access the different various sites without 90 million logins because we i mean that's this isn't news we all know this like having all of our bad passwords because we have too many logins makes for pretty bad security um and that to me is also where i'm i'm excited about the tmf and the current focus on on cyber security and customer experience at the same time like these go so so concretely together when you have bad networks people use their use the wrong ones because it's just easier right to use your home wifi even if you or the hotel wi-fi i mean like even if you shouldn't and so it's about making making that part easier um and so to me that that's the promise of login.gov not neces i mean there will be improvements to usa.gov i'm like fully on board with it and um and i think it's really exciting to just see how you make it easier to meet people where they are for whatever specific benefit it is or service they're trying to access and when it comes to meeting people where they are you mentioned the improvements to usa.gov can you just uh speak to that for just a sec no no that's my big question only because i'm not i i that's not where i'm not at tts um which is managing it i'm at the tmf and the tmf at this i've only been back for three months so i'm just not up on the latest but we've all i'll i'll put it out to uh if anyone wants to talk about but basically the idea is to reimagine uh usa.gov this sort of once kind of obscure like listy looking website into a front door for the entire federal government maybe steve i'll ask you you know what do you what benefits do you see kind of accruing from that move well i think i think the phrase they used was everything should be three clicks away right so um that's a challenge right because one of the i think the biggest challenge we have in the federal government besides part of the mandate is what to build trust right we want to make sure we trust the government and we as industry and the government need to help work to do that there's programs out there to do it um but knowing what you're looking for is just as much of a challenge as the where to go right so what do we call things what you know this human-centric design goes right into vocabulary right which is you know every industry and particularly government particularly each vertical has their terms for things that are very esoteric right you don't know what form you're looking for you don't always so having some speech-enabled uh you know design around i am looking for x and then making sure that that's mapped to one of many many many many phrases um and so to enable that journey i think that that leads itself when you start just focusing on a web page that leads into all kinds of things you could do with speech analytics and and then you know the customer experience across the board so while you might look at the front door of a portal that same methodology can be applied to um emails chats even natural language and then you're starting to create that vocabulary map and a dictionary that is then referenceable so i think you know the data that it's all about data right the data we're gathering when you do an initiative like usa.gov and and the lessons we learned can be applied across the entire industry and i think that's why three clicks away is pretty aggressive but i mean you know i think part of this can be education and jonathan one of the big pieces one of the big uh new pieces of language i think we got from the uh from the executive order is life events that the organizing people's interactions with governments around different life events i'm hoping you can speak to that and and see what sort of benefits i think that ties into what you were just asking about usa dot gov you know that there's about 17 life events in there from things with veterans that barbara talked about to you experience a disaster experience poverty and when i worked at usda i worked on the food stamp program you notice potentially snap now and you know that's just one of many programs that exist for someone in need and there is medicaid and there might be unemployment benefits that are required or children's health insurance or other kinds of things some at the state level some of the federal level but if you're that person in need you know you you want help from the government trying to figure out the bureaucracy of all the individual agencies at your state at the federal level is not something you should be doing during maybe the hardest moment in your life so um government has to be easily accessible it's government for the people right and whether it's a usca usa.gov or a state kind of portal it should be very simple to go to a website and say what you need and then not just be directed to six or seven different websites but if i collect information about somebody why can't i share that to those subordinates to those programs in my agent in my government my sphere with whatever the poverty programs might might be and you know start applications for these different programs in those underlying systems we're not going to change all the systems or have one system but you know as as steve said it's about data flow and if we understand the workflows if we understand how the data flows through the environment when that life event happens and we have technologies that support the connection of those systems and data we can make government a lot simpler for people and we can make it easy when someone has that you know really hard moment to be helped along the way to get to a better outcome where they have opportunity to do better to improve their life to get you know beyond um you know beyond where they are today government should government shouldn't be the impediment and the technology government uses and shouldn't be the impediment it should be a accelerant and we have the ability to do that but traditionally we haven't applied those technologies which are commercially available we have all have access to them to these problems until now with with the cxeo and again i am very excited like jesse is that the tmf can be the um you know it can be the match right you know that starts the fire and we can have some of these examples that really highlight what's possible and that changed the way people think about their government and that over time increases trust in government trust is at an all-time low to the extent that we can do some of these things to change the way people think about government we've done tremendous service to the american people i think and some of these programs you talked about there they're federally funded but they're administered at the state level sometimes there's you know 50 plus different systems um what can sort of the cx community do to address this issue i think we begin by recognizing that you know the person using government that citizen they don't know or care how many different programs or agencies there are they know that these programs exist and they want access to them so i think we start when you start with the that person in mind that citizen or maybe even a non-citizen with their recognition that they have to they have something to overcome and they need help and we take away the the walls that we sort of naturally put up between our agencies and programs and we think about it from the perspective where all this stuff is out there we should have easy access into it when we begin to design with this idea of a superset of programs and data and you know opportunity and connecting those things the fact that they're all these underlying systems that are different we're never going to get away from that we'll always have lots of different systems the trick is to figure out how the work and data flow between those systems and then use technologies that can make that those workflows really simplified and make it invisible to the person behind the scenes that there are all these underlying systems and if i could just speak to that with in terms of applications to the tmf and also some of the the bigger projects that i want to see it's it's having policy folks and program folks and technologists all at the table at the same time to do that having and i know this is part of your world too but having those program folks at in the room to say here's why we can share this data or here's the policy change that needs to happen for this information to actually get shared out and then the designers to say i know like there's a lot of let's just put all the data out there but good designers and product managers working on these different tech teams can really make a huge difference in identifying which pieces of information are actually useful and really needed and i think in in finding out what those more specific slices are it really creates an opportunity to deliver some incremental value and say yeah there's this longer term here here's what it looks like when all of these systems are integrated but if we had this one piece of data flowing back and forth you know this piece of income information defined in this way could really make a difference between these two very specific programs that people are coming at at the same time and when when i'm seeing the most successful and the projects with the tmf i'm most excited about i'm looking for for teams that have both of those program teams at the table um or both of those agencies at the table but saying i really think that this other agency is going to be excited when i give it to them is not enough for me there's a lot a lot of projection of like but i have i have cool toys and i'm sure you do um but being able to really ensure that that everyone is on board the program folks the policy folks and the technologists with making these changes together um and that the it's not the technology driving the program but the program driving the technology i think that's a great point yeah and i just uh emphasized something you said you know the policy people need to be there to help demonstrate or explain why data can or cannot be shared government isn't always logical right you know we we have limitations that have been imposed previously and they may or may not apply to the current moment but the policy people i work with always know what those limitations are and they can explain them to you and you have to ask and i i just love what you said it's that the policy should should drive the technology or the program should drive the technology and yeah that's the part that also i think is what can help shape the pot like there may be a specific directive and there are times it's by legislation and there are times that it's not it's interpretation and being able to have real user research that shows hey this may be your policy but this is how actual claimants for whatever benefit are experiencing this when you put this in a form here's how how badly they fill it out and then and then here are all the repercussions down the line which i you saw with a number of benefits programs uh during the pandemic and and beyond so having policy folks able to see whoa this was the policy this is our intent and this is not what's getting carried out because that's not how these folks who are in this particular crisis are thinking right now i think is a really important way to also help shape and shift some of the policy but to do that agencies have to be able to be doing user research with the actual benefit recipients members of the public potential members of the public who who are going to be using their services and similarly with the federal workforce who's who are currently doing doing that work right now yeah is that a big piece of the of the application process if you needed perhaps a memorandum of understanding or some kind of data sharing policy that has to take place in advance of launching something is that something that you want to see on the front end or is that something that happens as you're executing on the on the project i don't need we're not looking right now for like those kinds of formal legal documents those take a while and usually you need you need the project to get going to to give some incentive for that to happen but those folks can be at the table they can be part of the application process it can be clear that you know two different people are very from different agencies maybe they're co-signing it maybe they are coming to a meeting about it but there are ways to demonstrate that commitment without the legal piece that can take a while longer to yeah to make happen well that is sympathetic to that yeah well it's also it's really exciting you know the announcement with the the funding you know in conjunction with the executive order primarily because it's sort of the perfect storm right now as miserable as the pandemic has become it's brought the policy people to the table with the data folks and the it folks to figure out hey we're doing remote work what can we what can't we do what is our policy about how data moves and where does it move people looking at it now more than ever at the same time everybody's been doing this digital transformation moving to the cloud right now the ecosystem is there to start this data sharing agencies have been mandated to have a chief knowledge officer that's moving forward as part of the data act and as we get a hold of the data and we can create this ecosystem i think the timing could be better for this 100 million dollars to show up with specifically customer experience because this the customer experience technology drives it touches every piece of of an infrastructure of the ecosystem and so you get an opportunity to look across the board um security policy and procedures absolutely what technology you're using today and where you want to go so you create that vision statement and married to the money you have um it's it couldn't be a better time for it so and i think we've been talking about this a little bit but i wanted to foreground it the language of the of the cx executive order stresses shared services the development of shared services some of those are kind of probably behind the scenes for most people but how do those help facilitate improve customer experience sure so in my mind it's about doing it once instead of you know if we're talking about medicaid 54 times although that's a different different animal and so in my mind these shared services you know something like login.gov that's a shared service where that research can be done and even if an agency is working on a different but related login issue that login.gov isn't necessarily the right product for the moment there is now really clear research um that they've they have and can talk about of how people are interacting with the system what does that really clean and simple interface look like um and i think that's the piece of shared services uh that matters so much or the va you know has a technolo has a tmf award investment right now and they're going to be able to be doing some research uh with with veterans on on how they're interacting and and being able to do some of the authentication that they they need um to do some of this two-factor authentication and what does that look like for people who maybe have less less internet access or maybe have lower technology skills and doing that kind of research is then really great for all kinds of other people that are doing it so in my mind you know the shared services whether it's grants or uh or login or verification or you know just journey maps um or some of this life experience stuff there are all of these are ways to uh to only have to do it once and then be able to amplify those lessons across government and just want to build on a point you made earlier which was really good that customer experience and employee experience are linked because you know employees are customers of their agency and if there are shared services that can provide me a an employee service that i need and i don't have to struggle to get that from my agency but i can get it from an agency that is really good at it my employees experience is better and my engagement in my agency goes up and i do a better job serving the customers of my agency so shared services can be applied you know really strategically to get an agency more focused on its core mission we do replicate these services in hr and i.t and in finance and procurement so many times across government and there are agencies that really stand out and really do a great job and if they can be streamlining the back office operation and creating the environment for great employee experiences the byproduct of that are great customer experiences so there's a strong connection that you hit on earlier and i don't think that we can have this conversation fully unless we you know note that and uh we're really attentive to how we change the way employees who work in government experience government too that's great yeah i want to open it up to questions from the audience uh one of the great things about being back live is that we can hand people to mike so i think we have a question did we have a question here anywhere i thought i saw a hand earlier there's one well i was sure the mic was here thank you sorry i have a question about the process to get the data to implement customer good customers experiences with good ui and ux i work on a program and we're constantly battling rules around the pra so it's a catch-22 we need to know the how our customers are feeling what they want how they feel the experiences yet we get a roadblock in order to collect that data and i just wondered what your thoughts or advice would be and i could see this being something across any program that needs to be able to find out you know the results of how well you know something is being implemented and used so are you talking about um at the agency accessing the data that's at their disposal or just collecting it and doing the discovery part of it um both so the program i'm on involves government or any fed and private sector so if it's gov it's not a problem because you can do that but when you're interacting with the public and you run into this and so we're kind of stuck and guessing and we'd rather make decisions based on data rather than just you know a guess there are a number of ways to gather that data securely and without having to ask the customer to reveal anything that might be um you know overly sensitive in their mind right so um this this introducing empathy at scale that i talk about the whole journey mapping um there are you can catch it on every channel right you can do as i mentioned natural language um and analytics to get a tone and and judge what's happening you can gather information on an email and a chat or a chat session from a text and that you as long as you're you're analyzing that in real time and making sure that makes its way into a centralized database that's that's that's at the agency's disposal or the or the private customer there's nothing there that they don't already have it's about making sure you have the tools on the front end to gather and do it real-time analytics so there's there's software that can do that today um it's not very expensive it is um you know you do have to take a look at the entire front end to look where you're gonna inject that but what you do is you do you end up with what what john is talking about which is um you gather data across the board you're making the experience so much better if i know you're trying to renew your driver's license and i see you've been to the website six times you were about to click yes and then no you called in twice and hung up because the call was too long when you do reach an agent i don't have to play 20 questions as an agent i can say oh i see you've been to the website you're trying to your driver's license how can i help it's a better experience for the agent because they don't have to play 20 questions and then the caller understands that you understand but making sure that you can do that journey mapping across the board is really important but that technology exists without having to reach into separate databases you gather it as the call is in flight or that contact we're just about in time i want to just get to one more question yep okay so uh really appreciate the conversation i'm andrew i'm at docusign for federal and i really appreciate jesse your comments around addressing burden and you talked about projects making an impact and the customer journey the improvement there but i'm wondering is there any resounding theme that you've identified as you've you know come back into this leadership role at gsa is there any one burden that resonates throughout that you've seen that's greater than the rest i was hoping you could maybe elaborate more on just some of the that key burden to tackle from your perspective um i'm actually i think this is maybe a better thing to look at some of the life experiences that the that omb and the white house have talked about of um some of their was it 17 you had the number jonathan 17 great 17 different life experiences um where they were a number of researchers and policy folks and program folks have looked at what what is the burden um and difficulty of going through some really critical times of life so uh different kinds of financial crises um or uh or different kinds of emergencies and disasters and and how do those what are the different kinds of agencies you you need to touch during that time and and i think there's going to be some more research coming out about that um so i'm not going to give the full answer now but yes uh there are a bunch yeah well that's going to be all the time we have i'd really like to thank all of our panelists steve jonathan jesse really appreciate you sharing your wisdom with everyone and thank you for being here