How Renata Made a Business Case for Knowledge Management Overhaul in Government
Renata Philippi is currently a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, where she is tasked with optimizing the overall experience that U.S. veterans encounter. When not working, she can be found at concerts, dining out, and traveling.
By Renata Philippi, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
Many governments worldwide are not known for having seamless user experiences when it comes to engaging with their services. Government agencies have seen challenges from infrastructure to service delivery.
Building from the customer experience priority outlined in the Biden Administration’s 2021 Executive Order 14058 on “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government,” many U.S. government agencies are rethinking the way citizens interact with government service websites. Tech experts from the private sector are recruited to zero in on the hurdles blocking efficient processes and are tasked with fixing them. Since its founding in 2012, the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows* is one of these programs launched to streamline, digitize, and modernize government processes.
The U.S. government is actively trying to improve user experience, and it’s going through a sort of renaissance of UX.
I’m one of many Presidential Innovation Fellows working to improve the experience and reputation of interacting with government services. We are tasked with diving deep into the processes and realities of government departments and finding out how to improve their operations in partnership with federal leaders and other subject matter expert civil servants. I am currently working for the Office of Veterans Affairs.
To dive deep into how to improve operations and processes at the VA, I first had to conduct a lot of research to understand how the processes were currently functioning. It turned out that some colleagues worked heavily in silos while working on their projects, and essential project-specific documentation and research was either difficult to find or lost entirely once those projects wrapped up.
Adding to this complexity, I also discovered that there were multiple approaches to managing documentation, and different departments within the VA couldn’t easily communicate and share. There was no single source of truth, and essential information crucial for critical processes was impossible to find. Therefore, I wanted to tackle the research repository problem within the VA.
A lot of the same problems you see in the business world, you’ll also see in the government.
It was clear that knowledge management was a pain point based on the many interviews I’d conducted with employees and the research I’d done. Still, I wanted to substantiate these insights further with an airtight business case to convince the VA to change its current knowledge management processes. So I started running the numbers, seeing how long it takes for a colleague to find a needed document or content item in the heavily siloed VA realm. I discovered during these interviews that it could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours to find a document.
Disclaimer: The graphic of the Numerical Prototypes De-risk Innovation business case above uses hypothetical data in order to illustrate the value of these prototypes and does not represent factual or authorized figures from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
These results were compelling and proved the point that investing in a better knowledge management protocol would result in not only substantial savings for the department but would also allow us to spend our valuable time and energy on other initiatives to help veterans.
I’m currently working on wrapping up the user research on knowledge management, which includes insights into how teams are using the documentation, the research they’re working on, and where they’re saving items. Our teams are very excited about being able to quickly provide user research to colleagues and leverage the work of other designers across the agency.
The Presidential Innovation Fellows (Twitter, LinkedIn), part of Technology Transformation Services (TTS) at General Services Administration (GSA), is a highly-competitive fellowship that pairs talented, diverse technologists and innovators with top civil servants and change-makers working at the highest levels of the federal government to be innovation catalysts. The program was founded by the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) in 2012 and has been proudly housed in GSA since 2013.