Fostering True Collaboration in Government

Fostering True Collaboration in Government

Fostering True Collaboration in Government 1

The challenges for government operations continue to grow. The workforce is diminishing, even as the tools to support employees become more complicated and spread out. Resources to modernize are minimal, and different agencies often use them for duplicative services. Public sector processes of development, procurement and strategy continue to follow linear, slow timelines while the private sector rapidly innovates to compete with government services. Add to these challenges the trials of a new administration—with new policies, people and tools—and you can begin to understand why operations in government have to change.

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Contents

Executive Summary

4 Frameworks for Government Collaboration

The future of government relies on finding ways to effectively collaborate among stakeholders.

But how can government achieve that future amid the current landscape of technology silos, cultural aversions to sharing and processes that promote static handoffs over collaboration?

6 Sharing Information 9 Removing Data Silos for Better Collaboration 10 Partnering with Others 12 The Lone Star State Takes State and Local Collaboration to the Next Level 14 Connecting Employees 16 Cross Disciplinary Collaboration and Innovation at DHS 18 Removing Silos 20 Collaborating for a Better Constituent Experience 22 Conclusion 23 About & Acknowledgments

This guide explores four tactics to transform the way government operates, including: ɦɦ Sharing across departments and agencies to ensure that decisions and practices are based on as much information as possible ɦɦ Partnering across government and with the private sector to pool resources and knowledge ɦɦ Connecting an increasingly global and techreliant workforce with common processes and tools ɦɦ Training a diverse array of employees to promote collaboration and a shared understanding of challenges To foster these interactions, many agencies will have to reimagine the culture of government, while also investing in new processes and tools. This guide uses analysis and first-person interviews with current government leaders to examine how to effectively deploy those tactics to foster collaboration. Government’s future lies in collaboration. This guide will help you start working toward effective collaboration at your agency.

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Frameworks for Government Collaboration There are very few problems in the country that one agency, subcomponent or locality can solve. Whether it’s rebuilding infrastructure, reforming our healthcare system or responding to a natural disaster, solving these complex issues requires collaboration within organizations, across agencies and among levels of government. That’s why the federal government has taken great strides in the past few decades in promoting collaboration to solve problems. Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) goals, shared services and the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) are all examples of legal frameworks that foster collaboration in the public sector.

Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals In 2015, the Obama administration set the 16 active CAP goals, which can be found on Performance.gov.

They focus on mission and management topics such as accelerating the infrastructure permitting process, improving cybersecurity systems, assisting veterans’ access to health services, investing in job creation, delivering efficient customer service to citizens, and supporting open data initiatives. Because CAP goals signal the priorities of the executive branch, it is likely that the Trump administration will issue a new set of CAP goals early in their tenure.

CAP goals are a set of federal priorities that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established with the White House and senior agency officials. Originally instituted in 2012, they outline areas where agencies can work together to solve crosscutting issues and put in place structures to measure initiative outcomes and progress.

The administration designates leaders and agencies that are responsible for spearheading reform efforts on each CAP goal, and these leaders produce guidance, best practices and performance updates to ensure progress. These individuals and their offices can work across government agencies. By publishing performance metrics and successful case studies on Performance.gov, agencies can also better collaborate in order to achieve benchmarks and advance goals.

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Shared Services One CAP goal specifically directed at improving collaboration involves the use of shared services. Shared services is an industry-leading business practice that various federal, state and local agencies are implementing.

It involves consolidating processes, systems and workforces to improve efficiency, cost effectiveness and collaboration across government.

Each federal agency has subcomponents, and each of these subcomponents may have its own human resources, financial management or information technology offices to support mission functions. But it is probably unnecessary for each subcomponent to have its own HR offices, for example, because that creates duplicative personnel and work functions, which can lead to miscommunication and hinder collaboration.

In a shared services model, agencies would combine the offices to create one HR provider for an entire department. The provider can either be created internally or can be private external contractors, but both models allow agencies and subcomponents to collaborate with outside organizations.

For example, the same private provider for financial management serves the Department of Education, the Department of Labor and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while the Department of Interior’s self-created financial management office also serves the Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which are part of the Department of Homeland Security.

By purchasing management services from the same providers, agencies save resources that can be spent on their missions. But more importantly, providers facilitate collaboration on how to solve management issues. If OMB issues a new IT or cybersecurity policy, each agency or subcomponent does not have to individually spend time and resources on understanding and implementing it because the provider will work with stakeholders to update systems accordingly and ensure that all agencies comply with the new policy.

Intergovernmental Personnel Act IPA allows agencies to recruit employees directly from state and local governments in addition to other qualified organizations such as academic institutions and government-related nonprofits. Agency leaders can use the authority to hire full- or part-time employees for up to two-year terms. The purpose of the authority is to allow agencies to fill crucial management needs or find candidates with particular skills who can solve governmental problems.

By recruiting candidates from different backgrounds, agencies can better collaborate with external stakeholders to protect IT systems, work with state governments when designing policy and improve customer service for constituents. Employees hired with this authority bring diverse perspectives, knowledge and network connections to agency operations and challenges. These qualities facilitate collaboration inside and outside the organization.

Solving problems in Solving problems in government has become government has become extremely complex, extremely complex, so it requires intense so it requires intense collaboration inside and collaboration inside and outside agencies. CAP goals, outside agencies. CAP goals, shared services and IPA are shared services and IPA are three ways that agency three ways that agency leaders and employees are leaders and employees are learning how to overcome learning how to overcome challenges to solve common challenges to solve common issues. Government can issues. Government can efficiently collaborate efficiently collaborate through these methods, and through these methods, and the constituents will benefit the constituents will benefit as a result. as a result.

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1 Sharing Information The Problem

Challenges

Since Sept. 11, 2001, information sharing has been a primary objective of the intelligence and defense communities. But more than preventing terrorism or other national crises, the ability to share relevant information among a wide array of stakeholders is a key component of any collaboration strategy in government. It’s necessary to achieve mission objectives, even as resources and the workforce dwindle.

Although the need to share information may seem obvious, there are many privacy, security and scrutiny concerns that prevent government leaders from encouraging it. For one, a lot of government information contains sensitive, confidential or personally identifiable data on employees, projects and even citizens. It’s difficult to determine what information is appropriate to share with outside parties, especially when confidentiality or sharing agreements aren’t in place.

Without information sharing, best practices often go unnoticed or underused. As a result, agencies spend more time and money to achieve results or identify insights that other organizations have already realized. That leads to wasted time, duplicated efforts and decreased employee productivity.

Opportunities to make better, data-driven decisions are also missed when decision-makers don’t have access to robust and relevant information. As organizations increasingly connect internally, to other agencies and to citizens via technology, massive amounts of data are created. Without the processes in place to share and interpret that data, however, it’s nearly impossible to make actionable decisions based on it. As new decisionmakers join agencies with shifting goals under a new administration, it will be crucial for leaders to take advantage of legacy knowledge and historical data to inform future moves.

Increased public scrutiny over privacy, and recent government leaks, also make many employees hyperaware of the potential fallout from improperly shared information. If sensitive information ends up in the wrong hands, an employee and the agency they represent could both be in trouble.

Plus, even if appropriate information is shared with the right people, other government bodies or the public may use that data to criticize an agency’s efforts and progress.

In the face of governmentwide budget cuts, many agency leaders may be hesitant to share information that shows they aren’t as productive or effective as possible.

Cultural apprehensions aside, information sharing is also difficult to achieve on a technical level, particularly because of cybersecurity. Safeguards have to be applied to make sure information is secure at rest and during transmission.

That means agencies must maintain local cybersecurity processes and ensure that the receiving agency or person also has those protections in place.

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Example The Defense Digital Service created an initiative called Code.mil to involve federal, private-sector and individual software developers in the creation and open sourcing of Defense Department code and software. Part of the initiative focuses on finding partners that can help DoD make the most of the power of open source without compromising security or intelligence.

Ways to Start Information Sharing People ɦɦ Normalize sharing from the top down, starting with a more transparent leadership that leads by example. ɦɦ Address concerns about information sharing headon by explaining the purpose of collaboration and ensuring that punitive actions aren’t taken based on openly shared information. ɦɦ Publish simple datasets and reports that aren’t mission-critical or likely to attract scrutiny first in order to acclimate employees and departments to information sharing.

Processes ɦɦ Incorporate sharing mechanisms, such as multi-stakeholder meetings or reports, to relay lessons learned from project timelines, post-mortems and outcomes. ɦɦ Take advantage of structured informationsharing environments like the ones created at DHS to participate in existing processes without having to make your own strict procedures and standards. ɦɦ Clearly define what types of information should be shared with whom, for which purposes and in which format. Then publish those definitions for all employees to easily access.

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Tools ɦɦ Leverage open data platforms to publish and use data across departments and agencies, as well as for public analysis. ɦɦ Store code and other project materials in open source repositories such as GitHub so that other stakeholders and agencies can reference them for their projects. ɦɦ Apply cybersecurity measures, such as encryption and public-key infrastructures, that protect information in transit and make it available only to authorized users inside and outside an organization.

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For Government, Education and NonproямБts AWS.AMAZON.COM/DCSUMMIT

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TECHNOLOGISTS

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Removing Data Silos for Better Collaboration An interview with Jed Sundwall, Global Open Data Lead of Amazon Web Services Governments face unique challenges in accomplishing complex missions – often with limited resources. That means that when it comes to tackling such missions, there are very few agencies in the public sector that can act alone.

“Collaboration is core to governing,” said Jed Sundwall, Global Open Data Lead of Amazon Web Services (AWS). “I can’t think of a single agency that doesn’t have to collaborate with external stakeholders, whether those are other agencies, non-profits or some other organization.”

In an interview with GovLoop, Sundwall shared why collaboration is important to government and what challenges agencies face in facilitating collaboration. He also addressed how agencies can remove data silos to improve their collaboration processes.

One of the most important types of collaboration for government is information sharing. It can help agencies save costs and increase efficiencies. But information sharing can only be achieved by removing data silos. Data silos tend to be the norm in government and are fixed data that remains under the control of one department or agency and is isolated from other agencies and departments.

However, there can a steep price to pay for agencies who maintain these data silos. Sundwall calls it “the cost of knowledge” - the time and effort it takes someone to access needed information.

For example, if a city water department decides to start digging up the streets and replace pipelines a week after the street is paved, there’s a clear lack of communication between various agencies and departments. Not only did these entities fail to collaborate and share information, they also wasted time, money and labor.

Instead, fostering collaboration through information sharing and the removal of data silos enables a smarter, faster and more insightful government. This type of collaboration can best be fostered through inter-agency data sharing, which enables government to use resources more effectively and develop new programs and services based on insights gleaned from collaboration. Secondly, collaboration can be fostered through open data, where agencies make data sets available to constituents and external stakeholders. Lastly, cloud technology enables data to be easily stored and accessible.

One example of how inter-agency data sharing and open data can help reduce the cost of knowledge is the city of Philadelphia’s open data program. They open sourced their data pipeline software and have provided documentation on how they run their data pipeline on AWS. “They’ve taken advantage of the fact that AWS allows you to share infrastructure as code,” Sundwall explained. “You can get a script that will set up all the components you need to run your agency program’s code exactly how Philadelphia manages theirs.”

By opening up their data program, Philadelphia allowed other cities to enjoy the benefits and cost savings. Using Philadelphia’s open source code, San Diego was able to deploy a new version of the open data portal, DataSD. They didn’t have to pay any additional costs for labor or time to develop new codes for their portal. Now, residents on the West coast city can have access to data about city operations including public safety, street repairs, public facilities, code enforcement and business licensing.

In addition to open data portals, cloud is enabling agencies at the local, state and federal level to harness all the benefits of collaboration. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used Amazon’s cloud platform to enable them to share more important data with the public. The agency saw a 130 percent increase in use of their data after putting it on the cloud. Now, the public can access real-time and archival weather radar data as an AWS public dataset.

AWS can help agencies get started with their collaborative open data and cloud services with their comprehensive tool kit for sharing and analyzing data at any scale. Additionally, internal employees, other stakeholders and the public can quickly and easily analyze important information with scalable computing and analytics services.

Collaboration fueled by information sharing and the removal of data silos is helping agencies make their data more open and accessible for internal and external stakeholders alike. Strategies and tools like inter-agency data sharing, open data and cloud are enabling better information sharing and collaborative processes.

By removing data silos and fostering collaboration, government can fuel entrepreneurship, accelerate scientific discovery and, most importantly, be more transparent to the public.

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2 Partnering with Others The Problem

Challenges

Government is constantly dealing with shrinking resources, specifically budgets and staffs. At the same time, citizens place increasing demands on government services, adding even more pressure on agencies to perform. Yet newly proposed budget cuts for fiscal 2018 may make it more difficult for civilian agencies to hire the personnel they need to achieve their missions. This means that government must navigate their goals with smaller budgets and fewer employees.

Collaborative partnerships, such as public/private partnerships and interagency collaboration arrangements take time, relationship-building and serious commitment.

Lack of a shared vision can affect partnerships and the very relationships that make them. Experts at different agencies have a variety of goals and experiences, and getting everyone to agree on one common, unified mission can be challenging. There are also real and perceived security concerns in addition to cost-bearing considerations that can hinder these important relationships.

As agencies try to achieve their missions with such constraints, it is becoming abundantly clear that they cannot always do so on their own. Collaborative partnerships with other agencies, sectors and stakeholders are needed more than ever to achieve efficiency while spreading the burden of costs and workloads for staffs.

Without effective collaboration, agencies can miss out on fulfilling their resource needs and gaining best practices from other organizations.

Collaborative partnerships that involve resource sharing represent a commitment to something larger than the focused organizational goals and objectives of one agency.

Additionally, such collaboration helps agencies enter mutually beneficial relationships with other agencies, private companies and even academia to achieve shared goals, visions and reciprocal interests.

Although governments have increasingly turned to the private sector as an additional source of funding, such partnerships come with financial risks. Some partnerships intended to ease resource burdens on government may end up costlier. Private companies will do what they are paid to do and no more, so incentives and performance requirements must be clearly laid out in the contract, otherwise agencies will still front more of the costs.

Additionally, the private sector simply works at a faster pace and does not have the same regulatory constraints as government. This can make it harder for public/private partnerships to create shared, clear and consistent contracts and frameworks.

As for inter-agency partnerships, organizations may also be reluctant to share relevant information with national security partners because of a lack of clear guidelines for sharing resources and security clearance issues. This can make it increasingly difficult to set and agree on interagency priorities and goals.

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Example To maintain more than 380 miles of flood control channels, Orange County, Calif., officials created an Adopt a Channel program. The arrangement allows companies to contribute resources to storm water and runoff systems in exchange for positive publicity from the county. According to one report, Adopt a Channel has already covered up to 45,000 square feet of graffiti and picked up 9,000 tons of trash with the help of private-sector partners.

Ways to Start Collaborative Partnerships People ɦɦ Confront and clarify concerns about sharing information outside organizations early in the relationship. ɦɦ Eliminate ambiguities at the beginning of the contract—or framework— drafting processes to ensure clarity on expectations of goals, how costs will be shared and who will help achieve objectives. ɦɦ Create a common purpose by focusing on the users of services or projects in question rather than agency interests alone. By walking in the service users’ shoes, entities can better team up and unite to achieve shared interests.

Processes ɦɦ Create formal mechanisms to standardize collaboration across organizations while helping entities hold one another accountable. The Government Accountability Office has helpful approaches. ɦɦ Apply whole system methods in which processes address entire systems rather than individual organizations. For example, to address healthcare, a whole system approach also considers housing and income needs that contribute to the healthcare issue. ɦɦ Distribute leadership responsibility to partnership members closest to the services or users in consideration.

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Tools ɦɦ Use a detailed logic model, graphic representations, of the intended relationships of a program’s activities and their projected effects. ɦɦ Measure and monitor how members are connected and how resources are leveraged and exchanged with tools such as PARTNER. ɦɦ Evaluate collaborative partnerships and their successes with question-andanswer assessments to guide you through the preparation stage, function and roles in partnerships, goals, benefits and outcomes.

The Lone Star State Takes State & Local Collaboration to the Next Level An interview with Monte Mercer, Deputy Executive Director, North Central Texas Council of Governments Increasingly complex demands and major sources of fiscal stress such as constrained budgets and slow tax revenue growth are affecting state and local governments.

However, collaboration across state and local entities can cut costs, improve services and help agency leaders work more effectively. In particular, shared services arrangements and regional planning agencies allow state and local entities to take advantage of collaboration opportunities.

Take the Lone Star State, Texas, as an example. Contrary to its nickname, the state has fostered effective sharing of services among regional governmental entities to promote efficiency. The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) is a voluntary association of, by and for local governments. It was established to assist local governments in planning for common needs, cooperating for mutual benefit and promoting sound regional development.

In an interview with GovLoop, Monte Mercer, Deputy Executive Director at NCTCOG, discussed how the council has helped state and local governments collaborate and improve service delivery through shared services arrangements and regional coordination.

NCTCOG serves a 16-county region of North Central Texas, which is centered around the two urban centers of Dallas and Fort Worth. NCTCOG has more than 230 member governments including the 16 counties, numerous cities, school districts and special districts.

Although there are many differing opinions and experiences to manage in such collaborative partnerships, Mercer said that they yield benefits. “In the public sector, we all work for different councils, boards, commissions and have different responsibilities,” Mercer said. “However, when we bring these subject-matter experts together, we really have more in common than not, which leads to opportunities to learn from each other.”

Shared services help state and local entities identify common solutions and build stronger relationships across public-sector industries. Shared services arrangements promote cooperative opportunities as a way to avoid costs, improve service delivery or maintain services.

“With shared services, you get experts and leaders from various agencies who can contribute to the solution because they’ve been there before, maximizing program outcomes,” Mercer said. “Participation by these experts and leaders provides greater insight on who the service providers should be and what the services should look like.”

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and rule out what doesn’t work so you can get to the real issues.” At the same time, Mercer said not to be afraid to try new things and push the envelope a little. “If we’re not breaking a few eggs every now and then, then we may be doing what we’ve always done,” he said.

Often, shared services can take longer to organize than a program for an individual organization because there are more people, ideas and approvals involved. Still, shared services offer a large payoff for state and local governments when outcomes are successful.

For example, NCTCOG recently introduced its North Texas SHARE program, a new solution center designed to deliver a customer-focused marketplace to meet the needs of North Texas’s public-sector entities. The program is the direct outcome of successful shared services arrangements over the past decade. Local governments partnered to identify common needs in the North Texas area in order to combine volumes, standardize methodologies and develop scalable solutions through collaboration and cooperative purchasing efforts.

“However, forming collaborative partnerships and sharing services is not always a simple process,” Mercer said. It takes time, planning and coordination with stakeholders and subject-matter experts to ensure successful outcomes.

Mercer offered three key success factors to other state and local agencies looking to explore cooperative purchasing opportunities and shared services initiatives:

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Don’t overreach. Focus on small steps and achievable outcomes first so that the collaboration efforts result in quick successes and keep the initiative moving forward. “Pilot programs can help you plan in stages and serve as a foundational launch point,” Mercer said. Agencies should plan carefully, listen to all members of the collaboration and take time in execution stages to make sure you’re achieving the desired outcomes.

Explore all options. Take others’ experiences into consideration and make sure you’ve narrowed your project alternatives to the best option that works for everyone. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” Mercer said. “It’s important to explore every option

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Exercise patience. Don’t expect everything to go smoothly with the first program or project. “Just because the first attempt didn’t work doesn’t mean the next one won’t result in success,” Mercer said. He emphasized the importance of exercising patience and allowing individual agencies to voice concerns while having confidence in the ability to work together. “Be contemplative and reflective and take the counsel of others in various agencies.”

Ultimately, Mercer believes that regional and local collaboration offers tremendous benefits for government.

“It’s such a great opportunity to learn from others and develop solutions,” Mercer said.

“Collaboration is one of the most intellectually stimulating things I get to do.

It’s a privilege to take all the experiences I have and those of others to participate in finding common solutions to solve government challenges together and make our business better.”

As state and local government responsibilities become increasingly complex and demanding, leaders must constantly seek the best ways to provide services efficiently. Collaboration is the future of the public sector. Through partnerships and tactics like cooperative purchasing and shared services, agencies can share the costs, experience and knowledge needed to achieve desired outcomes.

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3 Connecting Employees The Problem

Challenges

The silver tsunami in government has arrived as significantly more workers retire. According to the Pew Research Center, millennials now outnumber baby boomers in the workplace, 76 million to 75 million.

Millennials are also expected to make up 75 percent of the workforce just 10 years from now. As a result, governments are experiencing a significant “brain drain,” making knowledge sharing among current employees more critical than ever.

Connecting employees is difficult for government for a number of reasons. First, government often lacks needed mentorship programs and training for employees, given constrained resources. Agencies are unable to give professionals individualized, personal and in-depth training to employees seeking leadership and mentorship opportunities.

But the workforce is also increasingly mobile, which creates other problems. For one, it makes it harder for employees to connect and share knowledge. Growing telework options also add to the connection challenge.

Whether employees work remotely from home or overseas, they lack access to vital connections with other personnel to drive knowledge sharing, production, efficiency and engagement in work.

Additionally, many agency departments are siloed with little to no communication among employees outside their own workspaces. Not only does this lead to an inability to share critical knowledge, but it also can lead to a lack of employee engagement. When agency personnel are isolated from other colleagues, they often feel a lack of motivation and connection to the agency’s purpose.

One way to combat this disconnection is with enhanced mobility and connection among employees. This allows quicker access to government workforces dispersed nationally and even internationally. Connecting employees also allows the ability to provide previously unavailable services and applications to support mission operations in the field.

The increasingly mobile workforce presents an additional set of challenges in terms of managing and mentoring employees who don’t report to the office. Finding the right modes of communication, tracking productivity and building trust all become increasingly difficult when limiting in-person interactions.

There are also a number of security concerns with bringyour-own-device policies and other teleworking solutions.

Agency personnel must worry about authenticating certain devices and access privileges while ensuring that employees are practicing good cyber hygiene by not leaving their personal devices vulnerable to potential hackers.

Finally, processes in agencies often are not conducive to agile interactions, leading to siloed handoffs between departments during projects. Many leaders may look at their organizations and dismiss department inefficiencies and lack of cross-functional solutions with immature employees or lack of basic training. However, these behaviors are often a result of a silo culture, or mentality, and can hinder efficiency and important relationships within agencies.

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Example The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation recently launched Telework!VA. The program has reduced the number of commuters on Virginia’s roadways and works as a one-stop resource for other government agencies looking to implement a successful telework program.

Overall, Telework!VA helps agencies connect and retain productive employees and reduce employee absenteeism.

Ways to Start Connecting Employees People ɦɦ Consider alternating between in-person and virtual events to incorporate teleworking and remote offices into the worklife of in-office employees. ɦɦ Implement telework training sessions for agencies, managers and employees. The Office of Personnel Management offers guidance on establishing telework policies that ensure that work is getting done while employees stay connected. ɦɦ Encourage constant and asynchronous communication. To address the cultural aspect of connectivity in the office, connect employees by having more in-person interactions and virtual communication portals.

Processes ɦɦ Swap traditional waterfall approaches for agile development cycles, in which departments work closely together for each iteration of a process or project. ɦɦ Integrate daily “standup” meetings during which teams briefly discuss individual priorities for the day and upcoming deadlines for projects. ɦɦ Create opportunities for peer mentoring.

By investing in informal programs for employees’ personal and professional growth, agencies can help employees feel more connected with one another and their agencies.

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Tools ɦɦ Enhance mobility with BYOD policies that meet teleworking needs while satisfying security requirements. The National Institute of Standards and Technology offers helpful guidelines for establishing such policies. ɦɦ Implement collaborationas-a-service solutions that allow employees to seamlessly and securely communicate, collaborate on projects, store shared files or access team-based files and documents. ɦɦ Establish an agency intranet, where employees can access shared documents and social profiles.

Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration & Innovation at DHS An interview with Soraya Correa, Chief Procurement Officer at the Department of Homeland Security Every agency has a unique mission to fulfill. And within those agencies, there are a multitude of unique roles that must be filled to meet mission objectives. However, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chief Procurement Officer Soraya Correa explained that each of those support roles shouldn’t be viewed—or trained—in a silo.

and IT managers who will implement a solution. Similarly, a budgeting decision would include the same cohorts, even if procurement wasn’t explicitly required for the project.

In a recent interview with GovLoop, Correa described the initiatives she’s implemented at DHS to foster collaboration across disciplinary and departmental silos. She started by explaining the importance of training specialists together.

Correa explained what those conversations look like for her: “I don’t expect to teach my good friends in the CIO shop how to write a contract,” she said. “But I expect to teach them to understand some of the rules that govern us, why do we do something the way we do, our drivers and some of the things that they need to be thinking about when they want to take a particular contracting action.”

“For all of us who have specialized positions like IT, security or finance, we need certain knowledge skills, capabilities and expertise,” she said. “That’s garnered from certain types of training and certifications. But I also believe that once we have that expertise, it’s important to understand how we interact with our counterparts in the organization.”

Correa also said it’s critical to communicate in terms that are understandable to non-procurement professionals.

“For example, every time I’ve ever met with my customers, they’ve never heard the word ‘FAR’ out of my lips. I don’t talk the language of regulation; I talk about what it takes to make it happen.” she said.

To create that understanding, Correa advocates a crossdisciplinary approach to training and knowledge sharing at DHS. That starts with having conversations between departments, to meet common objectives. For instance, a procurement discussion should always include noncontracting personnel including the users who want the service, the finance personnel who will oversee budgeting

Beyond holding these clear conversations, Correa also encourages collaboration through more formal mechanisms. With former CIO Luke McCormack and other agency leaders, she established the Procurement Innovation Lab (PIL) in 2015.

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PIL was created to serve two objectives. First, DHS leaders wanted a place where new, more efficient procurement techniques could be tested without fear of repercussion. PIL provides a low risk, virtual incubation space for those tests.

Second, Correa said they wanted a way to involve all DHS employees in procurement innovation efforts. PIL creates a “reciprocal learning and continuous feedback loop” to do that.

After a contract award, the PIL project team reaches out to offerors and the program office. They conduct oral interviews to assess effectiveness of the procurement process and the innovative techniques applied. The anonymous feedback is then shared with the procurement team to promote lessons learned. But, sharing doesn’t stop there. Those takeaways are also discussed with the larger DHS workforce through PIL-sponsored webinars.

Webinars are hosted on a bi-weekly basis to normalize sharing and “institutionalize learning.” Each webinar begins with a 5-minute “Tone from the Top” presentation from a government leader. This leader—who could manage any discipline from IT to finance to procurement to the program—kicks off the session by explaining why they are sharing the information and why it’s relevant to multiple roles at DHS. Then, the webinar’s topic is more broadly discussed by multidisciplinary stakeholders to continue the theme of collaboration and sharing. “That is an example of where I bring people from all over,” Correa said. “We invite the entire acquisition community, by that I mean cost analysts, IT folks, engineers, program managers, project managers, logisticians —oh yes—and contracting people, too.”

So far, DHS is seeing significant interest in PIL. While webinar attendance started at between 40 and 50 employees, Correa said they regularly have more than 300 participants view their presentations today. DHS’s procurement innovation lab, as well as the buyer’s club established by the Department of Health and Human Services, were recognized by OMB as models for other agencies to follow.

Now, Correa is focused on expanding the collaborative methodology of PIL throughout DHS. She appointed an Acquisition Innovation Advocate to champion their agency-wide efforts, as OMB suggested. However, she also asked each individual component of the agency to assign an advocate as well. Those advocates act as a cross-departmental advisory council on acquisition, meeting once a month to share lessons learned and plan for future endeavors.

Through PIL and other efforts, Correa is determined to bring a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to addressing the mission needs of DHS. She concluded,

“If we only train ourselves and our discipline but don’t try to understand how others will perceive it, then how do we serve each other? How do we work well together? We simply can’t.”

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4 Removing Silos The Problem

Challenges

To meet its mission, government continues to expand and specialize. Consider, for example, that DHS was established only 15 years ago while DoD was created in 1949. Both serve similar missions but with very different organizational structures, IT systems and personnel. While an extreme example, the sorts of silos that exist here are prevalent throughout government.

Because departments and their systems have grown asynchronously, innovation often occurs in silos governmentwide. But with dwindling budgets and workforces, this one-off approach simply won’t do.

Bridging silos is necessary but difficult on operational, cultural and technical levels.

It’s common knowledge that the shortest—and most efficient—distance between two points is a straight line.

However, organizational and technical structures often prevent public servants from taking such a clear-cut path to innovation and collaboration. Instead, government employees confront silos between departments, information technologies and people.

These silos create huge barriers for public servants.

To share ideas, employees must navigate complex organizational structures and regulations. That effort takes time that a shrinking workforce already lacks and, as a result, best practices often go unshared. Then employees have to spend more time and effort to innovate internally, without colleagues’ help and expertise.

Silos also create significant resource problems for government. When different departments or agencies don’t coordinate on procurement needs, they can’t take advantage of economies of scale in purchasing or deployment. Agencies often acquire duplicative services that could have been procured through shared services agreements with less cost and effort. .

As new departments and teams form, new procedures, nomenclatures and standards are created that make it difficult for groups to speak the same language or follow the same processes to achieve common goals. Even when objectives are the same, groups often create very different ways to accomplish those goals—some far less efficient than others.

And as new procedures are formalized and regulated, these disparities only grow and staffs become invested in them.

Cultural preferences and ownership of processes make people less likely to work outside their departments.

There are also technical difficulties to bridging the divide.

Legacy technologies, along with numerous security patches and ad-hoc modernization attempts, have created a complex IT infrastructure in most government agencies.

As a result, many systems and the data they hold have ended up in silos. That makes it difficult to share data with other parties, given technical constraints to transmission, collection and data interpretation on both ends.

Revamping these systems so that they can communicate is no easy task, either. Besides standardizing data formats, agencies must consider the technical and security considerations that connected IT creates. Plus, any new technologies must be able to adapt to legacy, disparate environments if silos are to be eliminated.

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Example In 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development shifted financial management and HR from under its jurisdiction to a shared services provider within the Treasury Department. After initial success in combining services, HUD moved its travel services functions out of the department. Now it’s moving many of its financial management activities to the same provider.

Ways to Start Removing Silos People ɦɦ Organize multidisciplinary working groups around specific objectives, rather than by department or job function. ɦɦ Create safe spaces for employees to try and share new ideas, without the constraints of existing regulations or organizational structures. ɦɦ Encourage use of cross-departmental programs such as details or mentorships to increase communication.

Processes ɦɦ Craft processes that include multiple stakeholders and groups by rote (e.g., require security professionals to be involved in procurement procedures). ɦɦ Formalize data formats and standards, such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s data standards, to make it easier for different departments to share and use information. ɦɦ Require new processes to be vetted by stakeholders from other departments or agencies before they are formalized.

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Tools ɦɦ Use web-based applications that can be accessed across multiple devices and supported by diverse infrastructures. ɦɦ Adopt enterprise solutions that are easily scalable to new departments and IT environments, usually via cloud architectures. ɦɦ Deploy advanced data analytics software that can interpret multiple types of structured and unstructured data in a single platform.

Technology for people who are changing our world.

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Learn more at granicus.com.

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT

Collaborating for a Better Constituent Experience An interview with Natalie Fedie, Vice President of Customer Success, Granicus Collaboration is a common theme in government today because it can increase employee productivity, improve communication, enhance resource sharing and even cut costs. But in a drive to achieve these results, many collaboration projects forget the ultimate objective of government: serving citizens.

Too often, collaboration efforts improve internal operations while ignoring or even damaging the external face of government services. To understand how agencies should approach collaboration in a way that streamlines internal processes and also enhances constituent services, we sat down with Natalie Fedie, Vice President of Customer Success at Granicus. Granicus provides a holistic suite of services and tools to help government reach citizens more effectively.

Before an agency begins investing in technology, Fedie explained that leaders should rethink their efforts on a strategic level. “You can have the best systems in place to provide the best service, because those technologies are available today,” she said. “But, those systems have to provide a streamlined approach to the customer experience so that the constituent can access multiple departments, easily, at the same time.”

Rather than only considering the value of collaboration projects to internal cohorts, Fedie said constituent preferences should drive priorities and projects. That requires looking at services from an external perspective, often using strategies like customer journey mapping to understand how a constituent views your programs and processes. If services are related on a topical level but not on a programmatic or technical level, that disconnection can serve as an ideal place to start collaborating.

Ensure your collaboration efforts don’t disrupt constituent services by collaborating around areas of interests, such as housing or healthcare, rather than specific departments or functions like human resources or finance.

Rather than combining two departments because they share similar internal processes or tools, seek departments that provide similar services to constituents. By marrying those services in one portal or common process, employees can streamline the user experience for citizens. For example, a constituent would ideally be able to navigate between public health data and notifications about children’s vaccination requirements in a single place.

At the same time, agencies can reap the benefits of internal collaboration. “This approach forces government departments to

collaborate more behind the scenes, so that they can streamline that customer experience with technology,” Fedie explained.

As agencies begin tying internal services together into a unified constituent experience, departments should invest in common platforms that can connect and support a diverse array of users and processes. For instance, with content management solutions like Granicus’ Civica CMS, departments can connect communications systems to create unified messaging and content in a single online portal.

The City of Santa Barbara, Calif., took this approach in 2012.

Before, city services were communicated via a wide-ranging and chaotic variety of web portals, online calendars and direct messages. With Civica CMS, that changed. Now a single website hosts agendas, staff reports and meeting schedules for the city council and 38 boards and commissions.

That portal provides a host of benefits. Externally, constituents are able to easily navigate multiple city services, like accessing city council reports or requesting services from different departments, via one website. Internally, different teams are able to collaborate and increase efficiencies by using a single content management system to publish any city content or information.

That saves the city money on licensing fees, because everyone uses the same technology. It also fosters collaboration.

When they leverage common platforms, government employees are encouraged to work together. As they use the same portal and processes, employees will also become more efficient.

Different departments can share best practices, templates, and even staff to produce cohesive services for constituents.

As a result, constituent services are improved, even as internal processes become more efficient and cost-effective.

Collaboration will continue to be a priority of government operations, especially as state and local resources decline.

However, as Fedie reminded us, it’s imperative that collaboration goals don’t prevent agencies from meeting constituent needs.

Marrying efficiency goals with citizen demands requires a redesign of collaboration projects. Take an external view of your services, determine where they can be more streamlined and then encourage teams to rally around that goal. By creating common processes and tools for constituents, employees will naturally begin to share internal resources and ideas. That’s the ultimate goal of collaboration.

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Conclusion The future of government relies on finding ways to effectively collaborate among stakeholders. But challenges like technology silos, cultural aversions to sharing and processes that promote static handoffs all can hinder government from achieving that future.

To foster efficient and meaningful collaboration, government will have to reimagine its culture while investing in new processes and tools. Strategies such as sharing information across departments, partnering with the private sector to pool resources, connecting tech-reliant workforces with common tools and processes, and training a diverse array of employees all can help government effectively cultivate collaboration.

CAP goals, shared services and the Intergovernmental Personnel Act are all examples of legal frameworks that can guide agencies in establishing environments necessary for collaboration.

Ultimately, government’s future lies in collaboration. By effectively deploying the above tactics and regulations, government can better foster true collaboration, whether it be across internal departments, agencies or even sectors.

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About & Acknowledgments About GovLoop GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 250,000 members, fostering crossgovernment collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.

For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com. govloop.com | @govloop

Thank You Thank you to Amazon Web Services and Granicus for their support of this valuable resource for public-sector professionals.

Authors Hannah Moss, Senior Editor & Project Manager Francesca El-Attrash, Staff Writer Michael Steinberg, Editorial Fellow

Designer Kaitlyn Baker, Lead Graphic Designer

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