“They Have No Use for Someone Who Looks and Dresses Like Me”

There are many valuable lessons to glean from Code Red_, Steven Brill’s Time Magazine cover story on the rescue of healthcare.gov. For those calling out Silicon Valley for its apparent narcissism, there is a reminder of those who dropped everything to work practically 24/7 to save the Affordable Care Act, despite having generous health coverage themselves. For those ready to dismiss government as hopeless, there is the rescue itself and the truly heroic efforts of Todd Park and many others like him who helped work a miracle. There is the dramatic confirmation that yes, government IT efforts do cost orders of magnitude more than comparable private sector efforts, while producing systems that at best work badly, and often fail to work at all.

Brill opens: “This is the story of a team of unknown — except in elite technology circles — coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspect, Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn't work, this ad hoc team rescued it and, arguably, Obama's chance at a health-reform legacy.”

But there’s a problem with this narrative, and in John McCain’s advice to “Send Air Force One out to Silicon Valley, load it up with smart people, bring them back to Washington and fix this problem.” Bringing in Silicon Valley’s best and brightest is a powerful part of the solution, but it can blind us to the harder work still to be done.

The most poignant lesson comes at the end of the article, when Google Site Reliability Engineer Mikey Dickerson (the guy in the T-shirt), reflecting back on his months of nonstop work to fix the broken healthcare.gov site, puts words to the social and status structures that so clearly divide the Federal government from “metaphysical Silicon Valley.”

"It was only when they were desperate that they turned to us.... They have no use for someone who looks and dresses like me. Maybe this will be a lesson for them. Maybe that will change."

There is ample evidence that things are changing. Government clearly does have a use for someone who looks and dresses like Mikey Dickerson. The Obama administration knows that there is a crying need for more technical people in the Federal government, and is working hard to bring them in–and not just for emergency rescue efforts like the one Mikey was part of. The Presidential Innovation Fellows program actively recruits people who look and dress (but more importantly think) like Mikey, and the new 18F group at the General Services Administration is making a home for folks like him both on the east coast and the west coast.

Note: Applications are open now for the third round of Presidential Innovation Fellows. I’m particularly excited about the initiative to “create a ‘digital by default’ experience for our Nation’s veterans that provides better, faster access to services and complements the Department’s work to eliminate the disability claims backlog.” Helping to tackle the VA claims backlog by creating new digital interfaces to what are still largely paper-based processes is work that is both challenging and important. Anyone who has aspiration to use what they’ve learned in Silicon Valley to making a better world should consider taking six months to a year to give something back to those who need us now. The deadline is April 7. Apply now.

But bringing more top quality technical people into the Federal government is only part of the solution. It won’t work if those people are just put to work building systems that they have no role in designing. The heart of the problem is the design of government programs that don’t take into account the mechanisms by which they will actually be implemented. The UK’s Tom Steinberg put it perfectly: the elites study politics, philosophy, economics, and law while failing to recognize that you can no longer run a country without a fundamental understanding of technology. He adds: “What good governance and the good society look like is now inextricably linked to an understanding of the digital.”

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Steven Brill said something similar about the failure of healthcare.gov in the disconnect between policy and implementation: “The way they managed this program, it was almost as if they thought that actual governing, the nuts and bolts of governing, is for peons. And they are policy people.”

That’s the real heart of Mikey’s complaint that the government “has no use for people like us.” He is saying something about the inverted social structure of DC relative to Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, the engineers are on top; if you do something, create something that people actually use, you rule the roost. Everyone else is essentially a paper pusher. In DC, though, if you write code, you’re generally about 30 layers away from the people making important decisions. The people who write policy documents and Powerpoint decks rule the roost. You who actually have to make the system work are “details.” You are peons. Unless you’re on the cover of Time, of course, but that’s, as Mikey says, because they were desperate.

Getting it Right

One government agency that gets things right is the UK Government Digital Service, or GDS. The GDS is a new government agency, founded in 2011, that has brought a team of top developers and designers into government. But not just into government at a low level, subservient to existing bureaucracies. Mike Bracken, the head of the GDS, reports directly to the UK Cabinet Office, and has a role not only in implementation but in the design of any government policy that includes a digital component. When a policy is proposed that can’t be implemented in a way that citizens can understand or use, he and his team have the power to push back. They also have the power to directly design, build, and deliver many services, at a fraction of the cost, without resorting to complex external procurements.

In May 2013, 18 months after GDS opened for business, the entire IT governance responsibility was given to GDS. The IT function reports to Digital, not the other way round. This is a critical decision, making a clear statement that technology is subservient to user experience.

In a recent BusinessWeek cover story, Obama’s Broken Technology Promise, Ezra Klein contrasted the success of the GDS with the faltering efforts of the Obama administration:

“What Bracken has that Obama’s tribunes of iPod government lack is power, staff, and the political authority to leverage both. He controls the British government’s domain names, so his 300-person team has been methodically building better digital services for virtually everything the government does—and then simply shutting down the lackluster services that previously existed in those spaces. It’s the exact opposite of the process that led to healthcare.gov, in which the Obama administration respected the existing lines of authority, while depriving the tech talent they’d recruited, such as Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, of the resources or the power to take control of the project.”

That is, until, as Mikey Dickerson said, they were desperate. And that’s no way to run things.

The work of the GDS hasn’t been flashy apps but rather simplicity: a paring down, and reordering of priorities that allows for an online experience of government currently a distant dream for the US, even with good programmers. No amount of good programming will result in simple, beautiful, and easy-to-use interfaces as long as the delivery teams are just taking orders from a regime addicted to complexity. As Mike Bracken once said to me, “I never want to hear from a policy person without a user on one side of them and a developer on the other.” Those writing policies to achieve important government goals need to work in partnership with developers, and those developers in turn need to adopt methodologies that let them release, test, and learn in quick cycles till they get things right.

The problem isn’t just technology itself. What needs to be learned from Silicon Valley is consumer technology’s relentless focus on user needs first. In the world of the consumer Internet, if no one picks up your app, you lose. If no one keeps using it, you lose. If it’s too hard to get through, you lose. If it doesn’t meet customers’ needs, you lose.

The “User” is the Citizen, Not the Federal Agency

Those in government who don’t understand just how much implementation matters to the ultimate success of their policies are doomed to create terrible user experiences for citizens. Government has long gotten away with this because there is no alternative, and people are forced to get through whatever awful application or service is provided. It is all too easy to forget that there is an alternative: it’s called apathy, distrust of government, and a failure of the goals of the programs that policy makers set out to achieve.

This delivery capability is central. In fact, Mike Bracken says “The strategy is delivery.” He explains one of his key tenets, that putting policy before delivery prioritizes the needs of the bureaucracy over the needs of citizens:

“There are two inarguable truths about the creation of policy when it comes to digital. Firstly, there’s far too much of it, especially in relation to subsequent delivery…. One of the many lessons in my 18 months in Government has been to watch the endless policy cycles and revisions accrue – revision upon revision of carefully controlled Word documents.... Subs to Ministers, private office communications, correspondence across departments and occasional harvesting of consultation feedback all go into this mix.

“Rarely, if ever, does user need get a look-in. User need, if referenced at all, is self-reinforcing, in that the internal user needs dominate those of users of public services. I’ve lost count of the times when, in attempting to explain a poorly performing transaction or service, an explanation comes back along the lines of ‘Well, the department needs are different…’ How the needs of a department or an agency can so often trump the needs of the users of public services is beyond me.

“It’s usually the way with all large, rules-based organisations: that more time and effort is spent on internal logic and process than on listening to and understanding real user needs. But in the case of public service provision, it is too often a completely closed loop....

“The second policy fact is that when it comes to digital strategy, and technology related issues in general, the absence of knowledgeable input from those delivering services is alarming. ... the policymaking process in general [is] ... insufficiently informed by practical experience.”

He concludes: “Looking at the highlights of what we have [accomplished], it is notable that delivery of services, whether they be information or transactional, has come before final strategy work is completed. Or put more simply, in an analogue world policy dictates to delivery, but in a digital world delivery informs policy. This is what agile means for Government and its services, and if delivered in this way, the ramifications are profound.”

What Government Must Do Now

There are no slick policy prescriptions that will make everything better. Organizational transformation - which is what we are really talking about here - is hard work. But there are some guiding principles:

• Digital leaders need a voice in policy, not just in carrying out orders from people who don’t know what’s possible with today’s technology. In top Silicon Valley companies, the management is deeply involved both in framing the problems to be solved and the implementation of those solutions. The leaders are deeply technical, and deeply concerned with user experience. Even in companies that aren’t led by engineers, top engineering management has a seat at the highest levels of decision making. And executives who are not themselves technical understand that they must gain a level of technical familiarity at least akin to their understanding of the law, finance, marketing, and PR, so that they can engage in meaningful conversations with those who have a deeper understanding than they do.

• Hiring technical, design, and project management talent into government is too difficult. Normal personnel processes are slow, and often literally make it impossible to bring in the right people for the job before they move on to other opportunities. The Obama administration should immediately create special hiring authorities for digital workers and empower competent leaders to hire the talent they need across government.

• Government must learn how to appoint a person to lead an effort, and give that person the actual authority he or she needs to get the job done. This doesn’t mean dictatorial rule, but it does mean addressing the overlapping lines of authority that require project leaders to focus on managing the needs of internal stakeholders at the expense of user needs. On Charlie Rose, Steven Brill explained how he first came to dig into the Code Red story. He was researching the healthcare.gov project long before it had failed, but soon recognized just how likely it was that it would be the disaster that it turned out to be: “Almost as a conversation starter, I asked each of these people [I was interviewing] who was in charge of the project. I wasn’t really listening to the answer, but then I got back on the train to New York, and reading my notes, I had gotten twelve different answers about who was in charge. And I got home to my wife that night, and I said ‘This thing is in big trouble.’”

• We need a clear rejection of “waterfall” methodologies of project management, which assume that planners can anticipate everything in advance, and replace them with the agile style of development that has taken over in the cloud era. Phased rollouts, constant testing, learning as you go, are the hallmarks of modern software development, yet government procurement, budgeting and planning processes continue to encourage antiquated methodologies that have proven not to work.

• User-centric design is essential. But we must replace the term “user-centric” with “citizen-centric”, to drive home the point that systems must be designed to meet the needs of the citizens who are the intended “customer” of government programs. We need to end the tyranny of overly complex business rules and processes that are strangling government's ability to deliver on its mission. The failure of healthcare.gov is a graphic demonstration of what happens when you dot every bureaucratic “i” and cross every bureaucratic “t”, but don’t actually watch what happens when citizens actually try to use what you have designed.

• Even below the highest level, we need a new depth of technical- and user-experience savvy in the management ranks. Clay Shirky put his finger on this issue in a recent Foreign Affairs article: “Because the government has not regarded the development of new technology as a primary function, technical managers tend to answer to nontechnical managers at every level of the bureaucracy.” This leads to several problems:

• It is extremely difficult for non-technical managers to make great technical hires.
• It is very hard for non-technical managers to make the kinds of adjustments that are needed when even the best plans meet the real world.
• And that in turn leads to reduced ability of even the best technical people to work independently.

That too was one of the lessons of the Code Red story that is too easily missed. The seven Silicon Valley superstars didn’t themselves rescue healthcare.gov. To be sure, they wrote crucial pieces of code, and identified key problems, but in the end, they were able to accomplish so much because they provided technical leadership that allowed the very contractors who had built the failed site to fix it.

What you can do now

Technical and design people: When government invites you in, say yes. For short term, high-impact gigs, there are the Presidential Innovation Fellows (applications due April 7th), the Code for America fellowships, and a variety of other competitive, high-profile programs. The Federal government is constantly searching for CIOs like Mark Schwartz, a Bay Area entrepreneur who was the CEO of EBay Auction tools site Auctiva before its purchase by Alibaba, and is now working to bring U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services into the 21st century. There are open jobs in all areas of the country for those willing to serve.

Everyone: Elect leaders who believe that politics is only half of the equation and that making the bureaucracy work better matters. Ask your elected officials about draft legislation like RFP IT, examples like the GDS from other countries, and positions on procurement reform. Make it known that we as citizens care about how government runs in the 21st century.

Top Photo: hxdyl/Shutterstock