CX Spark™, The Clearing’s customer experience assessment evaluates your organization’s current level of CX maturity to understand how well it is meeting your customers’ needs by focusing on five critical focus areas.

An intense focus on the customer and their experience is not a new priority for most private sector organizations. Just look at Amazon; and while it hasn’t always been that way for the federal government, that’s beginning to change – in some cases rapidly. In fact, my colleague Tim Rund noted customer experience is key a focus for federal leaders in 2022.

Why Now? 

There are a number of reasons federal leaders are focused on customer experience (CX); however, the biggest (in our opinion) is the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) and Presidential Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. Here’s Priority 2 from the PMA:

“Delivering excellent, equitable, and secure Federal services and customer experience.”

As Tim noted, we LOVE this shift. To toot our own horn, we’ve long worked with federal customers to develop people-first customer experience strategies. And now the President is on the same page, stating “People are at the center of everything the government does.” It’s also clear this is a top-to-bottom approach, covering “pivotal life experiences” to “routine service interactions,” and a change to the way government does business, as the President speaks to in the Executive Order:

“Further, the Federal Government’s management of its customer experience and service delivery should be driven fundamentally by the voice of the customer through human-centered design methodologies; empirical customer research; an understanding of behavioral science and user testing, especially for digital services; and other mechanisms of engagement.”

The Perfect Storm 

Organizations today are in a state of permanent white water, experiencing continuous change. That continuous change means survival instincts kick-in. But when you’re just trying to survive, it’s easy to lose track of why you exist. In the case of federal agencies, that reason is to service their customers.

Compounding matters (mostly for the better), today’s customer has more ways to voice their opinion on experience than ever before. That means leaders hear more frequently, and more loudly when things go wrong.

Combine those elements with the PMA and recent Executive Order and you’ve got a perfect storm of opportunity for customer-focused leaders.

“Organizations today are in a state of permanent white water, experiencing continuous change. That makes it easy to lose customer focus.”

Let’s Break it Down 

We believe it’s easier to hit your targets and goals by putting the voice of the customer at the center of everything that you do. For large agencies, however, that can be daunting. To make it a little easier, we break CX down into bite-size pieces.

Functionality: Is your organization giving your customer what they need?
Accessibility: Did your organization make it easy for that customer to achieve their desired outcome?
Enjoyment: Did your organization make the interaction an enjoyable experience?

The answers to those simple questions dictate how we work with our clients to deliver the most impactful CX solution for their organization. It’s also where our additional Solution Areas come into the picture.

CX as Part of the Organizational Whole

I sometimes think of our Solution Areas as a cycle where one type of engagement has the possibility to morph into another. Here’s an example:

Our CX team may begin an engagement to assess the customer experience and employee experience (EX) (which go hand-in-hand – a topic for another day). That work often bleeds into culture. Why? Because an organization needs the right culture in place in order to allow the CX mindset, principles, and customer-first posture to thrive. As we’ve discussed here before, leadership drives culture. That means we need to work with organizational leaders to ensure the right CX behaviors are being modeled starting at the top of the organization.

Our Solution Area consulting model provides the fluidity to begin an engagement in any area and shift to best meet an organization’s needs. To ensure that happens, I meet with my fellow Solution Designers weekly to discuss observations and needs from across The Clearing’s client engagements.

Our CX Approach

The Clearing’s biggest differentiator is our ability to combine CX expertise and evaluation with the change management elements needed to implement customer experience enhancements.

To do this, we embrace Agile principles and utilize prototyping via the Amperian Cycle, our rapid prototyping process. The Amperian Cycle allows us to approach CX through a quick, iterative lens, which means our clients don’t have to invest a ton of dollars or time to get started.

An organization can start with that iterative pilot and test into the right solution vs. going all-in without exploring options. We find this hugely beneficial. As my colleague Sharon said in her recent blog post on prototyping, “It’s better to fail fast and cheap than slow and expensive.” In other words, our process gives you more opportunities to get it right for your organization.

Most importantly, we do it all with a people-first approach. It’s not just lip service – we do it because it works. We truly listen to the people at the center of a change effort, which often indicates what an organization and its customers really need.

“Today’s customer has more ways to voice their opinion on experience than ever before. That means leaders hear more frequently, and more loudly, when things go wrong.”

Where CX is Heading

I kind of gave it away at the beginning, but it’s what’s in the PMA and Executive Order. It’s more organizations operating with a CX mindset and using it for good. Not just to improve service, but in service of equity, social impact, and social justice. It all adds up to what we talked about earlier: there’s a perfect storm of opportunity for leaders to dive into CX and improve the experience for customers and employees alike.

What’s Next

Keep an eye out for my fellow Solution Designers’ deep dives into their respective Solution Areas: Jason Miller on Culture and Sonya Patel on Strategy and Leadership. And if you want to chat about customer experience in the federal space, reach out to me at yasmeen.burns@theclearing.com.

         .           

            Sonya Patel                                        Jason Miller                                  Yasmeen Burns
Strategy & Leadership                                  Culture                                  Customer Experience

At The Clearing, we have the privilege of working with leaders of organizations of all shapes and sizes who are transforming into customer-centric powerhouses. Customer Experience or CX is a buzzword that is popping up all over the place. What do we mean when we say CX? Is it a trend or is it here to stay? If you are a leader or part of an organization that wants to disrupt markets, beat the competition, modernize their organization, and stay relevant, keep reading.

We are all customers.

We demand organizations give us what we need when we need it while anticipating what we need next. We demand a painless and immediate resolution to any challenges and that we are never bounced around without getting results. We appreciate a personalized touch with each interaction. We know when we have an amazing experience and we definitely know when we have a bad one. Imagine yourself as a customer of your organization. Would you let yourself have a bad experience? 

We know that bad news travels fast.

According to Technical Assistance Research Programs’ (TARP’s) study*, an average of five people will hear about someone’s good experience but 10 will hear about a bad experience, in person. Bad news travels even further on the internet. Four times as many people hear about a negative experience than hear about a positive experience online. If that wasn’t harsh enough, for every unhappy customer, at least five of their friends will never interact with that organization again. Organizations cannot afford to have one bad customer experience.

We embrace the Customer Craze.

We stand for “customer craze” where organizations adapt to get ahead of their customers or are already behind their competition. According to the world-renowned strategist, Gerd Leonhard, ‘Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years’. Organizations must act today and embrace their customer craze in a way that positively surprises their customers.

It’s never been more important to deliver a consistent, seamless, personalized experience for customers and to look toward the future to find innovative ways to anticipate their needs. So why are so many organizations behind on CX? Through our work, we have learned so much but found several misconceptions surrounding CX. In our following blog series, we’ll tackle some of the most common CX myths and offer actionable advice for putting the customer at the center of your organization. Look forward to our first installment of CX Mythbusters: CX Can’t be Quantified, coming soon.

As we mentioned in our inaugural IT Modernization blog, IT Mod is a large organizational, financial, and cultural commitment. It can feel like an insurmountable task to steer your company in this new direction. Leaders we work with on IT Mod efforts often ask, “Where do I begin?”

The simple answer? Just get started—and figure it out along the way.

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Rob Klopp, the former CTO, CIO, and Deputy Commissioner of Systems at the Social Security Administration (SSA). Rob is recognized as a leader in IT Modernization with experience at both the federal government and state levels.

Prior to his career with SSA, Rob worked in Silicon Valley. His modernization philosophy stems from this background, and draws heavily upon concepts like Agile, Lean, Minimum Viable Product, and Skunkworks. He never had any intention of entering the public sector, but that all changed in 2014, when he was invited to Washington D.C. to attend the kick-off of the U.S. Digital Services program, and former President Barack Obama entered the room.

Rob describes how Mr. Obama addressed the 30 people gathered: “He basically said, ‘Look, IT is extremely important. We need some help to get this thing moving in the right direction. While we can’t pay you very much, I know it will be much more difficult for you to say no now that the President has personally come in and asked you to join—so are you in?’” Rob was instantly hooked and signed on.

Once on board at SSA, he was faced with the daunting task of modernizing a 40-year old legacy system–one that many employees were comfortable working with. Coming from Silicon Valley, Klopp was accustomed to Agile development methodology, but he knew that this approach was new to the government.

During his tenure at SSA, Klopp helped transform the Agency by setting the foundation for IT Mod to deliver greater value to the American public. Before Klopp got into office, SSA had spent almost $300 million on software and had little to show for it. Klopp and his team took over the management of the disability case processing system (DCPS) project, listened to their customers at the state level, and applied an Agile and Dev/Ops approach. The first iteration of DCPS was launched on Dec. 16, 2016 and updates and deployments will continue throughout 2018. Under Klopp’s leadership, SSA turned DCPS from “zero” to “hero” in less than 14 months.

This accomplishment, along with many others, has been widely recognized in government circles, and Klopp has received several prestigious awards such as FedScoop’s Tech Champion of the Year.

Klopp, now an IT Mod consultant to the State of California, sat down with us to reflect on his experience with the federal government and to provide advice on how all leaders can successfully implement IT Mod at their organizations.

Q: What does modernization mean?

Let’s put it this way: the government is driving around a 30-year-old car—for the sake of the metaphor, let’s say a 1988 Chevy. We agree that we need to modernize, but we start looking at a 2012 Ford Taurus, which is relatively more modern, but not actually modern. Modernization means looking ahead to the 2019 Tesla.

The IT equivalent of really modern, leading edge but not bleeding edge is cloud-native software: systems built and optimized for the cloud. To be cloud native, new applications should utilize current best practices (although not necessarily leading edge) in software engineering. Although these practices might be considered somewhat geeky, they are captured very well in the highly popular short manifesto “The Twelve Factor App.”

The moral of the story is that if you are building something that is not cloud native, you are putting that hard work into systems that are not truly modern and will not stand up over time.

Q: What kind of internal support did you have throughout this transformation?

Having another C-suite executive on your side during agency-wide transformation is invaluable, and I was lucky to have support from the Chief Technology Officer. More importantly, I had air cover from my boss, SSA Acting Commissioner Carolyn Colvin. And I had my staff. I was honestly very impressed with the capabilities of the government employees. There’s this urban myth that government employees are not as competent as their commercial counterparts. This is not true, and I experienced it firsthand.

Q: Can you elaborate? What was it like going through IT Mod in the public sector vs. the private sector?

I found that in government sometimes “consensus” means “unanimity.” This is a recipe for failure. As “the boss” in a government agency, as long as I could reach the beginnings of consensus by enrolling the thought leaders, I could push the product through to completion.

I learned if you are going to do this stuff you have to exhibit leadership. Leadership means leading. It doesn’t mean facilitation. It doesn’t mean slowly trying to build unanimity. It means gaining a thinking consensus and driving forward from there.

Q: Speaking of leadership, what is your advice to other leaders attempting IT Modernization?

Simple: Just get started. You can’t go into analysis paralysis. Agile is all about just starting and refining along the way. The beauty of it is that you’re only thinking about the minimum viable product (MVP), you’re not thinking about this fantastic, perfect future. Once you get started, you incrementally and continuously improve, and that never stops.

I’m not saying the magnitude of IT Modernization isn’t large or that it’s not expensive. I’m saying that it’s not intractable. Staring at a blank page to create something is always hard. Staring at an old and complicated system and trying to create something simplified is perhaps even harder.

But the old and complicated systems are complicated because when they were developed they were at the edge of what commercial computing could achieve. Forty years ago, the SSA Title II application pushed the mainframe to the limit. Today, it would not be considered an extremely high-transaction volume.

Get started: think about the core business process as the basis for your MVP, build out the easiest part of that process and deploy it, then iterate.

Q: Is IT Modernization as difficult as people think?

It requires you to be a little bit bolder than you would be otherwise. However, it’s easier than everyone assumes it is.

The cloud is very useful to get started because you don’t have to build the infrastructure; you can rent it by the hour.

Furthermore, today a software “build” is really a “borrow”. Modern applications built in Silicon Valley utilize open source components from public libraries like GitHub and SourceForge. A new application may consist of as much as 80% borrowed code. Even commercial products are built from this stock.

Q: Can you explain more about the “buy” vs. “build” dilemma with IT products?

There is a fundamental belief in the government that a “buy” is always better than a “build.” Historically this was because the cost and the risk associated with a build was higher, although the benefit of a build was that you received a bespoke application designed specifically to satisfy your user needs.

But today, the equation is changing. Departments can “borrow” code and arrange it into that desired bespoke application.

IT Modernization makes the borrow and build option even more attractive because you can build a cloud-native application that will leverage cloud computing to dramatically reduce operational costs. Very few commercial packages are elastic and scalable in the cloud.

Note that this trend may not help the commercial off-the-shelf product vendors. It will, however, benefit the systems integrators and custom development houses. In other words, this is not an anti-commercial message. It is just that cloud computing and software technology have reached a point where the economics of a buy are changing relative to build options.

Finally, there are also low-code packages that are somewhere in between. Leaders don’t think about these as alternatives and so they often revert back to the way we thought about “buy” vs. “build” 10 or 20 years ago.

Q: So, how should leaders consider using low-code packages?

A low-code package can be an interesting option. There are some questions you should ask to determine what makes sense for you. Is the resulting application from a low-code package cloud-native? Cloud-native means elastic and scalable, deployed in containers, and in-the-best-case deployed as microservices. Does the low-code package deploy applications that follow the 12 factors? Can you use DevOps and Continuous Integration techniques with the package where code quality is automatically checked against develop-specified automated unit tests and product owner-supplied automated acceptance tests? Is the amount of low-code less than the amount of full-code once you factor in borrowing open source components?

Q: You’ve given us a lot of your current insight. What are your predictions about the future of IT Mod?

After IT Mod, comes more IT Mod…and after that comes more IT Mod. The reality is technology is moving so fast that the idea of software as a fixed asset—and once you build it you can just milk it for 20 years—is simply not realistic anymore.

In Silicon Valley, engineers spend two years to build a giant new product capability, deliver it into production, take a deep breath, and then immediately start re-writing it from scratch. It’s important to understand that the future is continuous improvement and continuous modernization.

Stay tuned for more interviews with federal and commercial IT leaders to learn their perspectives. If you’d like to learn more about leadership strategies through IT Modernization, contact The Clearing today.

What is IT Modernization, or IT Mod? Why are government agencies and other organizations investing so much time and energy into it? How do I get started on IT Mod efforts?

These are just some of the questions we hear from leaders embarking on the journey to update their outdated legacy business software and systems. Over the next few months we will start to shed light on answers to these questions by interviewing former and current tech leaders that have experience undergoing IT Mod transformations.

We’ll ask our interviewees to reflect on their successes and failures as well as the valuable and sometimes personal lessons they learned in the attempt to modernize and share advice that can be directly implemented in your organization. Along the way we’ll work with industry vets to address specialized topics relating to IT Mod, such as the tension between Buy vs. Build and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) packages.

The insights that emerge are not meant to imply there is a one-size-fits-all approach. Every organization, its people, and technological needs will vary greatly. Instead, we will share ideas on how to lead during IT Mod—or any kind of organization-wide change—by highlighting the successful tactics of industry and government leaders and common pitfalls to avoid.

Even those not directly in charge of these initiatives for their organization can learn how to ride the waves of change and be a more effective team member.

What is IT Modernization and Why Does It Matter?

Before we jump into the good stuff—the stories of leaders on the front lines—we wanted to level set on what IT Mod entails.

First, let’s address the concept of modernization in this context. For organizations, modernization is not a one-time event, but a continuous evolution to remain positioned for the future. Given the exponential change in technology being experienced today, it is critical for organizations to embrace and invest in modernization.

This means that the concept of IT Mod can be defined as the advancement of an organization’s existing applications and software with the purpose of aligning them more closely with current and future business and customer needs. Modernization usually occurs when the existing infrastructure or “legacy systems” at the front of daily business operations are outdated, presenting security issues or unmet business and customer needs. Technology is evolving more rapidly than ever before, and we no longer live in a tech environment where software can be bought or built and used for decades to come. We’re in a new state where modernization requires constant and continuous updates.

IT Modernization is an enormous financial, organizational, and cultural commitment, but there is also a strong business case for it. In particular, legacy systems are costly to maintain, and these costs continue to rise. Outdated legacy systems are especially common in large government agencies, with limited budgets that are usually spent on upkeep.

In 2017, Federal IT expenditures on simply operating and maintaining (O&M) current systems cost the American taxpayer an estimated $38.1 billion (find a further breakdown of IT spending on the federal government’s IT Dashboard). From FY 2015 to FY 2018, government IT departments spent 70% of this O&M budget on legacy systems. So, while IT Mod often has a large upfront cost, the long-term benefits can reduce the amount spent on operating and maintenance costs. Other benefits include:

• Increased cybersecurity
• More reliable systems
• Happier and more efficient users and customers
• Strengthened competitive advantage in the marketplace
• Enhanced facilitation of long-term organizational growth

It is important to note that IT Mod projects can be risky if poorly managed. According to a McKinsey & Company survey, 17% of IT Mod efforts can turn into a “black swan” for a company, meaning they become so costly that it threatens the company’s existence. And in general, large IT Mod projects with a budget of $15 million or more run 45% over budget, 7% over time, and cost billions of dollars in various overrun costs. The longer a project is scheduled to last, the more likely it will run over budget and time, which is why many organizations now deploy an Agile approach to software development. We’ll discuss this methodology in more detail later in the series.

Current IT Modernization Efforts

Clearly, IT Mod is a high-risk, high-reward undertaking. However, there has been an outstanding need for organizations to modernize their tech which can no longer be ignored. IT Mod has been a focus of the executive branch since the era of the Clinton administration. And with the Trump administration’s Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act in December 2017, the energy and support surrounding IT Mod has increased even more. The MGT Act sets up Centers of Excellence which help federal agencies through modernization and allow these agencies to repurpose unused IT budgets to fund projects. Agencies can also apply for funds from the Technology Modernization Fund. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are directed to focus on high priority efforts, which are outlined in this White House Report and include transitioning to the cloud, implementing shared services, and improving cyber defense.

Still, some federal employees think these priorities don’t go far enough. In a recent interview, David Powner, Director of IT Management Issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, stated that,

“The nation’s most mission critical legacy systems that are costly to maintain and post significant cyber risks due to unsupported software need to be replaced with modern, secure technologies and ultimately decommissioned… The administration’s recent modernization strategy was solid on network modernization, shared services and cyber, but light on tackling these most challenging modernization efforts.”

IT Mod is also front and center in the annual President’s Management Agenda. With this development, and funding finally appropriated for the Technology Modernization Fund, it’s clear this administration sees this as something that must be addressed here and now.

First up on the docket is the modernization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s systems. This effort just kicked off Phase 1 of its transformation on April 2 and will serve as a “sink or swim” example of whether large-scale IT Mod is feasible for the government.

What’s Next?

Stay tuned for our first interview in this blog series, which will feature Rob Klopp, the former CIO of the Social Security Administration, who ignited their IT Modernization process and got the ball rolling for other government agencies to follow suit. Rob will provide insights on the Agile approach and what it means for IT Mod. He will also discuss the challenges with moving beyond legacy systems and leading by consensus in change-averse environments. To learn more about successfully managing IT Mod efforts in the meantime, please reach out to yasmeen.burns@theclearing.com.