The Pitch
Matthew is one of the co-founders of the Colorado Digital Service, within the Governor’s Office of Information Technology. He previously served in the Obama Administration in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and at the City and County of Denver. This post represents the personal views of the author and not their current or former employers.
In 2019, I co-founded the Colorado Digital Service with Kelly Taylor after working with the Governor’s team, the state CIO, and members of the legislature to figure out how we could apply best practices from the federal level to our state. The Colorado Digital Service was based on the 18F and U.S. Digital Service models of recruiting tech talent into the public sector. Alongside Colorado, several other states and localities have organized digital service teams to work on their government’s most pressing technology projects. If the State and Local Digital Service Act passes Congress, we will likely see a proliferation of more technology teams in all levels of government modeled after the federal examples of the U.S. Digital Service and 18F.
I want to reflect on those initial conversations to get a state digital service formed. This piece is for folks looking to start a new digital service team in government. Let’s start by looking at the typical opening pitch, it usually goes something like this:
“In 2013 healthcare.gov was supposed to launch, you remember this, right? Wall-to-wall coverage on CNN showing the website not working for weeks after launch. President Obama’s signature law was in trouble because of a website.
Well, what they did was bring in a bunch of silicon valley smart tech people like a SWAT team, and they helped fix it. Millions of people signed up for healthcare just three months later. The lesson learned was that we were missing a key group of skilled people in government, and that we couldn’t recruit them effectively in normal conditions.
We need to build this SWAT team model and use it to attract talent to work on other burning projects. You [Mayor, Governor, Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary] want your websites and applications to work, you want tech talent in your organization. Create a digital service team!”
Like a political candidate using vague language to allow their audience to mentally fill in the blank with what they want to hear, pitching a startup or a new team in government plays on what your audience wants to hear. Odds are, they have scars from a recent tech project gone wrong that are fresh in their mind as you’re speaking.
In the years since the Presidential Innovation Fellows, 18F, and the U.S. Digital Service were formed, thousands of technologists have served in the federal government in some capacity. Their impact has been incredible. From products that touch the lives of veterans, students, and Medicaid recipients, to changing how we buy technology and hire tech talent. Those teams were also preceded by many other initiatives to improve the technology used and provided by the public sector.
The discussion inside this public interest tech community of current and former technologists in government has been appropriately critical of the above pitch. The pitch, as I’ve summarized it, oversimplifies the healthcare.gov rescue effort, is dismissive of existing digital and IT talent in government before these newer teams were formed, and over-promises what a digital service can do, implying it’s the single solution for any technical impediments to better government services. There are no silver bullets.
But still, you need a short, concise pitch, anchored to a national news event, started by a White House initiative, to help get past some initial skepticism that a team like this can change the outcomes we’ve come to expect from public sector technology. So let’s write a different pitch.
The pitch should focus on the main lever of change, which is attracting tech talent. We are appreciative of the technical folks who already made the choice to work in the public sector, and still the overall need for tech talent in government remains enormous. The public sector is disadvantaged compared to the private sector when it comes to recruiting and retaining current tech talent on the basis of salary, familiarity with tech roles and practices, and support for tech talent growth. After all, most government agencies are policy and program organizations first, and technology shops second. Most government agencies were “born” before the internet, and creating digital service capacity in-house requires attracting that talent.
The pitch also needs to set expectations. New tech talent will know their skillset really well, but they likely won’t know how policy is made, or how government services are offered. Similarly, the language technologists use can create a barrier with existing public sector staff. My former boss, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, used the analogy of a tandem bicycle to explain the role of digital service teams. You could describe biking to someone who has never been on a bike, but it was much more effective to invite them to ride with you and experience it themselves. Technologists and policy and program staff are on the same tandem bicycle together, both learning from the other and depending on each other. (See Jennifer Pahlka’s, Delivery-Driven Policy piece for where this collaboration leads)
The challenge you’ll have in that first meeting pitching a new digital service is that you’re by necessity, over-promising from the start and spending political capital on loan. If the pitch is successful, and you launch a team, figuring out how to balance smaller quick wins with larger initiatives will be key.
So let’s write a new pitch. If I were doing it all again, here’s the one I’d give,
“The term “digital service” refers to a cross-functional group of civic-minded folks well versed in how to approach and build modern technology that is designed for the people that utilize it. Their skills span a range of disciplines from engineering to procurement, product management to user experience research and design. The team will work alongside the experts we already have in government and empower them to build products and services as strategic initiatives in their programs.
At the federal level, several groups formed over the last decade to bring these skill sets into the public sector, including the Presidential Innovation Fellows, 18F, and the U.S. Digital Service. State and local teams from New Jersey to California have tried different models of this as well. There are a ton of learnings from these groups that help us become more savvy buyers and builders of technology.
We know that a smartly designed policy won’t work if we can’t deliver it seamlessly to the public who need it. We also know competing for tech talent is very challenging. We should create a team that has the communications branding, air cover, and ability to work on meaningful projects to attract new talent to our government to take this on. It won’t be a silver bullet, but it will help.”
We are gathering stories to include in a collection of learnings for new digital service teams. We’d love to hear from you! Email us at digital-service-start-ups@googlegroups.com or leave a comment below if you have a similar story to share.
