Federal CIO Clare Martorana exhorted government officials along with technology vendors to seize the present moment to make needed improvements in how citizens interact with government agencies and services during a Dec. 7 keynote speech at ACT-IAC’s CX Summit event in Arlington, Va.
Speaking about the imperatives of Biden administration policies that aim to improve citizen experience, the Federal CIO pointed to the coronavirus pandemic as an experience that “taught us a lot” about citizen service needs, and she argued that the correct set of conditions now exist to make progress.
“If we do not take this moment where we have momentum, we have funding to actually drive this transformation, it’s going to be another five years and there could be other incidents in the world that impact us,” she said.
“This is the moment for us to all work together to actually drive this change,” Martorana said.
The Federal CIO delivered her remarks after attending a celebration earlier in the week at the White House marking the two-year anniversary the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), which has customer experience improvements as one of its three primary goals.
Attended by more than 100 government CX pros, “the celebration was fun, because we tend to keep doing work and we don’t pick our heads up,” Martorana said.
Also coming up on its two-year anniversary is President Biden’s executive order to transform Federal customer experience and service delivery. Martorana called that order a “transformational document” that “really helped catalyze a lot of the work that we’re doing.”
The Federal CIO acknowledged sentiment among agencies that policy pushes such as those to improve customer experience require a lot of effort for agencies to comply with. But, she said, “we are working really, really hard in this administration to make sure that we are bringing together all of the components of government … the gears of government, making sure that we could use those gears so that you are able to deliver the best experience possible for the American public.”
Martorana reiterated that the government’s CX improvement strategy rests on the pillars of “simple, seamless, and secure.”
On the first issue of simplicity, she emphasized the need for making sure citizens know when they are interacting with the government, and creating strong visual design elements across the government ecosystem to make that recognition easier.
She offered an example of searching the internet for information on passport renewals, and offered that search returns will include the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. “I do user research almost every single week with people, and when they look at that they’re not sure if that is a trusted government website … so that is an example of us having to do better with the way that we are creating visual design and across the ecosystem.”
She said that good visual design is also key to creating a seamless experience for citizens.
“We have to accomplish tasks in government that transit multiple places,” she said. “If you’re applying for Medicare, you’re going to Social Security, we need to make sure that journey is seamless, that you’re looking at navigation, and it’s all in the same place,” Martorana said. “Those are things that we had to do using digital tools and interactive design.”
“And then job number one, full stop, [is] security,” she said, adding that progress on implementing zero trust frameworks “is absolutely mission critical.”
“Our adversaries are investing in attacking us,” she said, and it’s government’s job to make sure “you can trust the fact that you’re interacting with a government website that is secure.”
