The Mindsets of Innovators in Government

Technology

The Mindsets of Innovators in Government

A series of Interviews with high achievers reveals some surprising things about what it takes to get things done in the bureaucracy.

here is a governmentwide strategic push to support the development and use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and hybrid computing. The action is happening via cross-agency communities of practice and incubation hubs supported by the federal chief information officer and the General Services Administration.

As these initiatives move forward, real innovation is happening on the front lines of government. Dr. Alan Shark, executive director of Public Technology Institute, undertook a series of interviews this past Spring to learn from a handful of champions of cutting-edge innovation just what they were doing and how they were doing it. His interviews and observations are reflected in a new report for the IBM Center.

In talking with José Arrieta, chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, Shark learned that by using agile approaches, Arrieta was able to create the HHS Protect web platform back in April in days, not years. HHS Protect supports the governmentwide COVID-19 Task Force with near real-time information. This platform includes data from 6,200 hospitals, 3.0 billion data elements, and data from all 50 states plus all six U.S. territories—including all laboratories, all case information, and all of the diagnostic information that exists in the United States. Arrieta envisions the next step will be to secure these data via the use of blockchain technology so it can be more widely shared. Doing this would eliminate the cost burden of constantly replicating data as it moves into different databases.

In talking with Nico Papafil, the program manager of a venture capital-like program at the General Services Administration, called 10x, Shark also learned that there are scores of front line innovators across the government. In 2015, GSA experimented with running a single-day Shark Tank-like competition where federal employees could pitch their technology-related ideas to improve government services. The winning ideas were awarded a small grant to test them out, and the ones that worked were given more time and money to bring them to completion.  This one-time event worked so well that GSA decided to institutionalize this approach to identifying, testing, and scaling new ideas by federal employees in a period of weeks, not months or years. Twice a year, 10x hosts a competition around a set of themes. For example, the next competition’s deadline is August 5th and GSA is asking for innovations related to disaster management, direct public service delivery, and diversity, inclusion and accessibility.

In an interview with local government innovators, Shark found that technology could effectively be a bureaucratic silo-buster when using artificial intelligence tools. He talked with Barbie Robinson, director of the Department of Health Services for Sonoma County, California, and her colleague, Carolyn Staats, the county’s director of innovation, about their approach. Their initial effort to integrate service delivery to vulnerable populations was jumpstarted after a disastrous forest fire in the county in 2017. The county formed an interdepartmental multidisciplinary team to work together to provide holistic services to those in need. They were able to move quickly by adapting the lessons and technology from a similar pilot effort in San Diego. That effort was several years ahead of Sonoma County and it had developed a data management tool that brought disparate decentralized systems together into a central hub. Robinson and Staats were not shy about taking a “lift and shift” approach. It saved them years of effort. Once the Sonoma team started putting the pieces together, they mastered 91,000 unique clients across the first four systems in just four months. They used artificial intelligence to manage case notes. So now homeless service workers, social service workers, or health clinicians can see the relevant information about a particular person as never before—and never before in one place.

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The Mindsets of Innovators in Government