Tools for the Next Generation of Civil Servant

For the first time in many years government is riding the same wave of change as many private sector industries. Digital transformation, or the effects of changing processes and information into a digital form within an organization, is an extremely popular term in modernizing industries and is causing meaningful changes in industries from automotive to healthcare to construction.

Government is certainly at the back of the wave at this point, but can make the transition much more rapidly if it focuses on building the foundation first. There are several things the government can do to make this a reality. First, the federal government can double down on the recent push to hire more modern technology skill sets. A second, in order to support this new civil servant, it can focus on the adoption of the appropriate tools and technologies. And these two points are interconnected. Modern government programs need to have the tools to rapidly deploy software, understand user needs, and manage technology on a modern technology stack. Without tools to support this work, the talent will eventually chose to work elsewhere and the government will continue to look very much the same as it is now.

Can and will the government hire the right people?

I remember a few years back watching a government executive give graduating remarks at the Presidential Management Fellowship graduation. They asked to have the class raise their hands based upon corresponding degrees (e.g. policy, government administration, J.D.). Finally, the individual got around to engineering. A single person raised their hand. A pretty big category of education and there was only a single graduate with that skillset in a fellowship program that aims to bring along the next generation of government leaders. It was a living illustration of a problem that the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) sought to solve for in its creation.

The lack of engineering and technical talent spread across government (albeit, there are certainly pockets of deep expertise) is an issue that hinders all programs. Automating simple processes, analyzing and connecting structured data and applications, and designing information dissemination and services for users first can drive huge value into many programs. There is lot of talk about “Digital Transformation” in DC (accompanied by the compulsory Metro adds) but without human capital adjustments and adoption of the tools that these individuals need to do their work, digital transformation will just be a branded “cloud migration”, “mobile strategy”, or “unlocking of your data”.

On the human capital front, there are pockets of the government doing incredible work hiring part of the next generation of government talent and leadership with programs like PIF or offices like 18F and USDS. The individuals in these organizations are mainly technologists first with an interest in government and penchant for service — they will serve as a part of the change in government. The other part of the workforce (and likely the vast majority) will still come from public administration, policy, and law schools that will require additional training in these technical concepts. Thankfully, more of these schools are beginning to teach engineering, user-centered design, and data science as part of the curriculum. Carnegie Mellon was the first, starting a Engineering and Public Affairs program back in 1971, and today more and more colleges and graduate schools are offering joint programs or concentrations that bring design, data and computer science to bear on policy analysis, public administration and law.

The combination of these two factors — recruiting developers and designers into public sector work and training the next generation of policy and law experts in the fields of engineering, data science, and design — will hopefully solve the human scale question that troubled many of us working to build PIF, 18F and USDS.

Emerging tech platforms and tools — a critical piece of the puzzle

In addition to talent, the adoption of developer tools and platforms, which the new generation of civil servant will need to get their jobs done, will determine whether the digital transformation of government is successful. When 18F hired its first group developers, the first and most immediate problem the team ran into was being able to ship software at scale. Most of the tools did not exist in General Services Administration (parent agency for 18F) at the time to build software in the way the team required. Many off-the-shelf tools were brought into the organization. Cloud.gov was literally built to solve this issue and without its existence I doubt 18F would be where it is today. GSA could have ignored the need for new tools and pointed people to the brick laptops and waterfall development tools being used in house. Instead, it acquired and created new tools to allow the organization and its new workforce to succeed.

In many ways, GitHub has become the poster product for this new way of collaborating and working in government. Known as a repository for open source software, it has become a platform for software development. But, it can and is used for other tasks, some of which are very much in the traditional policy realm. The use of GitHub by policy officials went fully meta last year when GitHub was used to accept public comments on the Federal Open Source Policy. Here were policy officials with an understanding of software and the tools for its development, accepting and adjudicating thousands of public comments in less than six months.

There are hundreds of developer tools and platforms used across nearly every industry by companies trying to make this digital transformation or advance further into it. Twilio, a company that provides API based SMS, voice and messaging, is a great example. If you’ve ever received a call from a rideshare driver or verified an account login via text, it’s likely Twilio working behind the scenes. The product powers 75 billion interactions annually. Much of this driven by developers solving problems for their organizations using the product and then their company turning into a customer of Twilio. The federal government interacts daily with millions of constituents through costly tools like traditional mail and call centers, tools like Twilio could save the government millions while improving service and information delivery.

Twilio is just one of many. There’s Docker for containers, Stripe for payments, New Relic for web analytics, Elastic for search, Mulesoft for integration. These are the tools of the new generation public servants. If government is not equipped with these tools, recruiting and retaining talent will become more and more difficult and eventually stall, as there is far too much demand for these skills. Good talent will choose to go where they have the opportunity to succeed and other industries know this fact. GE wasn’t running ads about a just out of college software engineer to get young people excited about GE’s products, it was a recruiting pitch.

Beyond the talent angle, these tools are needed in order to deliver services and information in a modern way that builds digitization into the process from the beginning. Most of these tools thrive off of integrations with other tools and the most successful engineering organizations within companies leverage an ecosystem of tools and automated checks to ensure software development and design move at the most efficient pace with the lowest probability for error. The government needs to begin adopting these tools and the companies that build them need to be ready for government work.

Private sector can shape the future

Docde42 recently opened our application period for companies in the developer tools and platforms space. We’re looking for great companies who are looking to sell their products into the federal government and create the foundation to change how our government works along side of the next generation of civil servants. Join us in shaping the future of a digital government. Dcode42 provides emerging technology companies with everything they need to succeed in the federal market through our comprehensive accelerator programs.

Originally posted here.