How might federal agencies design centralized services to produce value for their agencies and help rather than burden their teams? This question is at the heart of what we are doing with this project.
For the past two years, 18F has been has been helping agencies approach this question - and a large part of our work has been around understanding the needs of the intended customer base. Although every project has unique issues, we’ve consistently found that involving users in the design process mitigates risk.
Through this project, we will use outcomes from past 18F consulting engagements to surface ways in which human centered design methods can mitigate risks associated with centralizing IT services across distinct teams. We’ve analyzed real scenarios in which our clients’ attempts to centralize didn’t work as hoped. And we’ve spoken to user groups to understand the ways that centralization will impact their work. We’ve collected many insights about how this plays out, and we want to share them with others.
Our focus is at the agency level and our intended audience is CIOs who set their agencies’ modernization strategies. Our goal is not to create a checklist or framework, but instead to introduce considerations for anyone making decisions around centralizing IT within their agency.
Because we anticipate growing efforts across government agencies to move towards more centralized models of IT services. 18F offers consulting services for agencies seeking more hands-on guidance, but we also want to make resources available to those in government who we cannot work with directly. It is our belief that making resources available to all agencies can make them more efficient in creating their service strategies, more strategic in improving the work of agency staff, and more powerful customers for vendors who assist with or provide the services.
Funding for this project comes from 10x. We're currently in our second phase of funding. You can read more about the different phases of 10x funding here.
*Note that this project is on hold during September and October. We’ll pick up again in November and anticipate releasing a final report by the end of 2018.
- Nikki Zeichner, Strategy @nikzei
- James Hupp, Content Design @jameshupp
- Aviva Oskow, Visual and UX design @AvivaOskow
See CONTRIBUTING for additional information.
This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:
This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.
All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.