How the VA is accelerating digital modernization

Federal agency leaders are working hard to improve their delivery of public services, especially in light of recent policy initiatives, including the White House “Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery.”

Chris Johnston, Deputy CTO for digital experience in the Office of Information Technology in the Department of Veterans Affairs, is among the growing ranks of federal executives focused on the digital experience of federal customers. In a new FedScoop video interview, Johnston highlights the key factors limiting the government’s ability to meet their constituents’ digital customer experience expectations and shares his insights on what VA has done to overcome challenges.

He says one of the most significant issues is competing priorities for limited resources for people or technology. The challenge is that “you have some old technologies and systems that you’re trying to blend with new processes.”

“VA has done a tremendous job on a number of levels… trying to take this user-focused, customer-focused, veteran-focused approach. Early on, there wasn’t a lot of warm reception to the idea [of modern CX processes]. Some of my predecessors had to come in and rattle cages… trying to be able to do some things that now seem natural, as part of any modern software development cycle.”

Johnston also describes efforts to reconcile VA’s many duplicate data reservoirs and the need to pull data together to enhance the digital experience that better together to make it a more intelligent choice for veterans.

Saqib Sheikh, head of strategy and growth, federal and nonprofits at AWS, shares some ways modern technology has helped federal agencies.

“One of the biggest challenges we see with our federal customers is dealing with the explosion of digitized data out there. Data really is at the heart of designing and delivering exceptional citizen experiences,” he says.

“We need to think about bringing together data in scalable data stores, with things like enterprise data lakes that help you pull different types of data in real-time and normalizing that and serving that in a controlled way across the organization,” adds Sheikh.

Learn more about modern technologies that are helping federal agencies improve the delivery of customer services. This video is the first in a series of panel interviews on Transforming the Digital Government Experience.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by Amazon Web Services.