3: Digital Services Innovation Center

Establish a Digital Services Innovation Center and Advisory Group

Other Information:

There are common challenges that all agencies face in trying to deliver better digital services at a lower cost to the American people and employees. Approaching these challenges as one government will enable agencies to focus their time and money on developing innovative, mission-facing solutions rather than re-inventing the wheel. •Launch a shared mobile application development program, in conjunction with the Federal CIO Council, that will help agencies develop secure, device-agnostic mobile applications, provide a development test environment to streamline app delivery, foster code-sharing, and validate official government applications. To augment the natural cross-agency collaboration that has developed through initiatives such as the Web Reform and Mobility Strategy Task Forces, OMB will formalize and sustain such coordination into the future by convening a Digital Services Advisory Group that draws membership from the Federal CIO Council, Federal Web Managers Council, and other agency leaders. Through its leadership, the Advisory Group will promote cross-agency sharing and accelerated adoption of mobile workforce solutions and best practices in the development and delivery of digital services that build in security and privacy and keep the federal workforce abreast of emerging technologies. Overall, in addition to advising the Federal CIO on implementation of the strategy, the Advisory Group will have three main focus areas: ••Help prioritize shared services needs for the Digital Services Innovation Center. The Advisory Group will identify areas that need government-wide leadership and work with the Innovation Center to determine the best shared solutions that leverage existing agency work and commercial options to the extent practical. ••Foster the sharing of existing policies and best practices using online platforms and communities of practice to provide more structure to existing ad-hoc collaboration efforts. For instance, many front-running agencies have already launched bring-your-own-device (BYOD) pilots that test new devices and solutions. The Advisory Group will work with the Federal CIO Council to develop government- Identifying opportunities for sharing existing solutions at agencies and building new solutions for government-wide use requires strong leadership, coordination, and support. To operationalize the principle of “build once, use many times”, GSA will expand its current efforts and establish a Digital Services Innovation Center. The Center will work with agencies to establish shared solutions and training to support infrastructure and content needs across the Federal Government (e.g. source code sharing tools, video captioning, language translation, usability and accessibility testing, web hosting, and security architectures). The Innovation Center will support agencies lacking these capabilities, not supersede agencies’ existing capabilities, and function as a cooperative enterprise that draws on resources from across government and leverages the expertise of forward-leaning agencies. At the outset, to support strategy implementation, the Center will focus on three initial actions: •• Identify shared and open content management system (CMS) solutions and support implementation through training and best practices. This will offer agencies an alternative to building their own platforms in isolation and enable code sharing and modular development. •• Help agencies develop web APIs and unlock valuable data by providing expert resources and other support to enable developers, entrepreneurs, and other end users take advantage of government data and content. wide BYOD guidance leveraging their findings. The Advisory Group will also work with the Federal Web Managers Council to develop guidelines for improving digital services and creating better digital content (see section 6) and setting up intra-agency governance models for delivering better digital services (see section 4). ••Identify and recommend changes to help close gaps in policy and standards. For instance, as new technologies are introduced into the federal environment, policies governing identity and credential management may need to be revised to allow the introduction of new solutions that work better in a mobile world. Equally, as new technologies emerge, telework rules may need to be revisited to allow employees to work from any location, as long as the device and connectivity are appropriately secure.

Stakeholder(s):

• Digital Services Innovation Center


• Digital Services Innovation Advisory Group

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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