The General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) are keeping people and end users at the center of new technology initiatives, top officials from those agencies said on Tuesday.
At the Google Public Sector Forum, presented by Scoop News Group, on Oct. 17, GSA Deputy Administrator Katy Kale said that agencies must balance bold technology moves with usability and accessibility.
“Security needs to be the base of everything that we do, but at the center of everything we do needs to be people,” Kale said. “And that is thinking about how we are reaching them right when they need to be reached, especially within the Federal government, and making sure that we have technology that’s accessible.”
Kale said one of the ways that GSA is “making sure that people are at the center of all that we’re doing” is through Notify.gov, which she said is in beta testing right now.
Notify.gov is a text messaging service that helps Federal, state and tribal government agencies to more effectively communicate with their program participants. Through the program, Kale said GSA is leaning into the concept of a “digital government,” because U.S. citizens today connect with both friends and government services primarily through their phones.
Additionally, Kale said GSA is also working with the Department of Agriculture (USDA) on an initiative that’s “still in beta, on how to connect people with SNAP benefits that they have earned.”
She also pointed to Login.gov as another example of a human-centered technology initiative.
“[This is] one place where citizens can go to login, get the benefits, connect to the agencies that they need, and not feel like they are going to be subject to fraud and that their information is being protected,” Kale said.
“Whenever we’re thinking about technology, we’re putting people in the middle,” she added. “So, we’re really excited about all that we’re doing, and we’re always thinking about the citizen and the end user, which is important.”
As for the DoD CDAO, Jinyoung Englund – who is the inaugural chief strategy officer (CSO) on the executive leadership team in the CDAO’s Algorithmic Warfare Directorate – said that the end user is also of the utmost importance at her agency.
“Risks can be and should be measured … and if you can figure out a framework for doing that, then it really should not be so scary for adopting technology,” Englund said, especially when it comes to AI.
“The way that we’re approaching that is by design. I sense a theme is emerging where we’re focused on the people and the human element – and that’s what we’re seeing at the CDAO,” she said.
The way that the DoD is trying to accelerate adoption of new technologies is by “spreading a culture of learning by doing,” Englund said. One example of how the DoD CDAO is doing that is through Task Force Lima, which aims to assess and integrate generative AI capabilities across the DoD.
“Task Force Lima is led by mostly active duty military whose sole focus is to take a user-centered design, a human-centric approach to identify what are the ways that generative AI can best assist our servicemembers and our DoD civilian counterparts, in terms of how we implement that new technology within our bureaucracy,” she said.
Through the task force, Englund said the DoD has already collected over 200 use cases that allow humans to do meaningful “human work.”
