William D. Eggers - Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government

After President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, the administration spent the next two and a half years developing the Obamacare website. On October 1, 2013, with a final mouse click, the website launched. Its charter was unprecedented: to help millions of uninsured Americans painlessly sign up for health insurance.

It didnt work that way. On the first day, HealthCare.gov received 4.7 million visitors, but only six people successfully enrolled .

Some of the websites early issues were born of poor project management and bad planning. For instance, just a couple of weeks before the site launched, the administration decided to make users register on HealthCare.gov before they could shop around for health plans. This created a massive bottleneck in the websites registration system, as did the sites unnecessary insistence on identity controls for users who just wanted to browse. The eligibility system also mistakenly excluded multitudes of eligible individuals. So th e $800 million website responded to both of its fundamental objectives register new users and confirm eligibility for health care planswith a resounding crash.

The backlash was instant. Some called it a catastrophic failure; for others, it just added to a lengthy list of high-profile IT breakdowns. When President Obama apologized to the American people, he acknowledged the broader issue of the way the federal government develops IT: There is a larger problem and that is the way the federal government does procurement and does IT is just generally not very efficient.

Ironically, though, the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov might just be the best thing to ever happen to digital government in the United States. The public failure reprioritized digital government in a way that neither appointment, nor report, nor congressional testimony ever could: It forced the president, his top advisers, cabinet heads, and members of Congress to directly consider how a website should function, how digital services should be deliveredand to address fundamental problems withhow government procures and operates IT systems. These problems remain deeply ingrained in the public sectors architecture. Government has done technology and IT terribly over the last 30 years and fallen very much behind the private sector, President Obama remarked.

It was the wake-up call of all wake-up calls. The shock to the system triggered a whole array of much-needed changes. The federal government quickly convened a new organization: the United States Digital Service (USDS), out of the White Housesort of a SWAT team to fix problematic digital projects before they ballooned out of controland accelerated the launch of another , 18F, the governments digital studio in the General Services Administration , staffed by, as 18F put it, doers, recruited from the most innovative corners of industry and the public sector, who are passionate about hacking bureaucracy to drive efficiency , transparency , and savings for government agencies and the American people.

Meanwhile, administrators untangled hiring rules to allow agencies more speed and discretion in tech staffing, part of an unprecedented recruiting drive to bring 500 of the tech industrys best and brightest into the federal government. (President Obama himself helped close the deal with some top recruits.) Within a year, 18F and USDS had hired more than 120 techies with pedigrees from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other tech giants . At the same time, the White House made IT procurement reform a top management priority.

With their extensive private sector backgrounds, this new generation of techieswhom Fast Company dubbed Obamas Geekscontributed a whole different view of what technology is and how it can serve government and citizens. With much of the public sector stuck in a mainframe mindset, this new group envisioned open-source tools and agile IT. While agencies historically defend their turf, this team aimed to help information flow freely across government agencies and programs. Most saliently , they introduced an unprecedented focus on the end user. Citizens wh o were once viewed as customers to be passively served as they stepped up to the window became active partners in designing more effective government.

An aging population, millennials assuming managerial positions, budget shortfalls, and ballooning entitlement spending all will significantly impact the way government delivers services in the coming decade, but no single factor will alter citizens experience of government more than the pure power of digital technologies . Governments from Chicago to Seoul are in the midst of a historic (and frequently wrenching) transformation as they abandon analog operating models in favor of their digital counterparts. In 2012, President Obama summarized it like this:

Todays amazing mix of cloud computing, ever-smarter mobile devices, and collaboration tools is changing the consumer landscape and bleeding into government as both an opportunity and a challenge. New expectations require the federal government to be ready to deliver and receive digital information and services anytime, anywhere, and on any device. It must do so safely, securely, and with fewer resources.

In the broadest sense, digital transformation combines five modern technology components that are coalescing to change the way we work, shop, communicate, and travel.

• Social. Allowing people to communicate electronically in real time
• Mobility.