Biden's CX order puts new momentum behind longtime efforts, leaders
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By
Natalie Alms
Officials at a recent American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) event outlined how a White House EO on customer experience for those using government services is helping to unify many disparate and related efforts across government.
President Joe Biden's executive order on customer experience, issued last month, named CX as a key modernizing government programs and to decrease the time and difficulty Americans face getting government services.
Work had already been happening on CX across the federal government, experts say, but the White House's attention has helped these efforts garner attention and prioritization.
Amira Boland, federal customer experience lead at the Office of Management and Budget, said at an event hosted on Thursday by ACT-IAC that she and other Biden-Harris officials acknowledged during an internal call the day the order was released that the order wasn't "a finish line" but is "definitely a refreshment station."
She added: "There are just so many pockets of amazing people that have been working on this for decades."
Now, the hope is that the executive order can unify disparate efforts to improve federal government CX.
"These are not separate initiatives in isolation, but part of like, 'let's stitch these together to really be amplifying and making this a priority of the government machine,'" Boland said. She noted that the order embeds CX into "all the ways the government works," from strategic planning to budgets.
Martha Dorris, founder of Dorris Consulting International and a former General Services Administration employee of over 30 years stressed that the measurement framework and accountability measures enshrined in the order set it apart from past efforts to improve CX in government.
"It establishes it as an administration priority, which then asks agencies or encourages them to do agency priority goals, putting them in Senior Executive Service performance plans. That's one of the ways you're going to get this stuff to trickle down into everybody's plans and performance across an entire agency," Dorris said.
At the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the executive order has more people "paying attention to the work that we're doing" and has spurred momentum in getting agency buy-in, said Jonathan Kraden, customer experience branch chief.
"It's helped open some doors that might otherwise have been shut," he said.