Mar 04 2008
Bringing Best Practices Around Customer Experience to the Federal Government
Project risk is keeping federal computer analysts (aka “business analysts” in the private sector) up at night. InformationWeek recently reported on some statistics by the U.S. Office of Management & Budget (OMB) where CIO Karen Evans was quoted as saying “there are 585 projects valued at $27B on the ‘management watch list,’ although some of those have also been deemed high risk. Projects can be deemed high risk for a variety of reasons, including being high-cost, highly complex, or high profile.” Typically project failure results in rework which we define as being a result of any, or all, of these factors:
- IT built a different project than the agency envisioned
- the application has missing features
- citizens or government employees won’t adopt it because it’s too hard to use
Mastering the customer experience is probably one of the single biggest playbook pages the government is now borrowing from private industry. It’s moving towards making agency sites as easy-to-use as highly trafficked consumer information and e-commerce sites such as Amazon, Travelocity and eBay. Adopting a customer-centric practice in application development means that crucial stakeholder buy-in happens up front, in the design phase of the project. It also means that usability testing happens before the application is built and with real end users.
Federal industry expert Steve Meltzer, president of Meltzer & Associates and former director of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Computer Acquisition Center captured the government’s new priorities in IT purchasing and development:
“The public sector does not buy IT for IT’s sake, but rather is driven by advancing the President’s priorities and providing citizens with easy accessibility to information.”
Today, we announced our entry into the federal market, led by Dean Terry with Spectrum Systems as our reseller. iRise helps to increase the success rates for federal IT projects because stakeholders – including the employees in the trenches – have the opportunity to test drive the application before it’s built. The release on our third round of funding, also issued today, referenced expansion into new markets and our entrance into the public sector signals the first example of that.
Learn more about iRise’s solution for the federal market by visiting this industry-specific page.
[...] West asked the two featured speakers - Casey Coleman, CIO of the Generalblog.executivebiz.comBringing Best Practices Around Customer Experience to the Federal Governmentup front, in the design phase of the project. It also means that usability testing happens before [...]