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+---
+id: 6-ways-to-navigate-the-civic-tech-sea-of-newness
+title: '6 Ways To Navigate the Civic Tech Sea of Newness'
+image: /assets/images/blogs/pifs-raashee-gupta-erry-vivian-lee-zoom-6-tips.png
+author: Raashee Gupta Erry, Vivian Lee
+published_at: "2021-03-24"
+summary: ""
+external_url:
+tags: ['']
+type: Blog
+social: blog
+---
+
+By nature, the [Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF)](https://presidentialinnovationfellows.gov/) program is a grand experiment in newness. What happens when we take a group of industry professionals and throw them into government? As career private-sector marketing professionals, for us, there was the triple threat of being new to government, being detailed to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an agency that had never had Presidential Innovation Fellows before, and navigating the ever-changing digital advertising industry from a public-sector perspective. We found ourselves in uncharted waters.
+
+Four months in, we not only gained our sea legs, but also got some pretty significant wins along the way. Here are six principles that guided us through those uncharted waters and turned us into navigators of a shared journey.
+
+<figure style="width: 80%; display: flex; flex-flow: column; padding: 5px; margin: auto;">
+  <img src="{{site.baseurl}}/assets/images/blogs/pifs-raashee-gupta-erry-vivian-lee-zoom-6-tips.png" alt="Screen capture of a video conference call between Raashee Gupta Erry (left) and Vivian Lee (right)."/>
+</figure>
+
+## **1. Become best friends with your federal partners**
+First, get to know each other extremely well. Go beyond the LinkedIn profiles and dive into motivations, beliefs, agendas, work styles, strengths, weaknesses, and life as a person. We made sure to present ourselves to the agency as teammates, and not as competitors. It might sound obvious, but it’s important! We do not innovate in silos. Our success is tied directly to the FTC’s success and, as a result, to safeguard consumer protection in the digital advertising landscape. Getting there is a team effort; we’re better together. We made it a point to remain partners and identify lead and support responsibilities amongst ourselves as opposed to creating a perception of independent contributors.   
+
+## **2. Identify the value exchange** 
+To build trust in a new environment, we focused on collaborative value. For us, “value” means the benefit that the federal agency gets from us, and what we get from our federal agency partners. It is beyond the goal of making an impact. It’s the day-to-day benefit we get from our work and interactions. In our case, the agency gets to be smarter in their work as a result of insights we share about digital advertising, marketing, and advertising technology. And in return, we are able to learn more about the enforcement and regulatory side of the industry that we come from, enabling us to become better marketers and advertisers. 
+
+## **3. Listen with purpose** 
+The first three months of the year-long fellowship are intended to be the ‘listening’ phase where we get to know our agency folks, their mission, challenges and priorities. We approached this ‘listening’ phase by identifying both our agency-assigned projects, and our personal interest areas. This helped us prioritize and earn some early wins by focusing on projects that brought value to our partners, ultimately building trust and confidence. At the same time, we were able to establish a path forward to seek out meaningful and valuable work to us as PIFs and in our long-term careers (we call this our ‘wishlist’). 
+
+## **4. Build your support network** 
+Branch out from beyond the initial agency-facilitated introductions. By building your support network, you can amplify your impact, gain allies, and build your brand. Take the opportunity to meet folks outside of your immediate team and chain of command. A casual coffee chat can go a long way in both your personal and professional development within your agency. This has led us to develop a network of allies who have helped clear blockers, steer us to new opportunities, and push forward on our ‘wishlist’ projects. 
+
+## **5. Embrace an entrepreneurial mindset** 
+We have been persistent in making progress on our ‘wishlist’ projects and have been diligent in taking actions. As often happens in government, we ran into a few dead ends that hindered our ability to make any progress. That’s when we took it upon ourselves to map out various paths to success. This often looked like consulting with our allies by taking an informal approach to seeking out the right people. Other than our relentless pursuit for coffee chats, we found other ways to lean into our organization like joining our organization’s official mentorship program. An entrepreneurial approach to finding solutions even within a highly rules-oriented, bureaucratic organization has been a key to our success. We have a long way to go to reach the end product, but we’re glad we’ve found a clearer way forward. 
+
+## **6. Become multilingual**
+Coming from industry, we knew there would be an adjustment period to acclimate to the lingo, working styles, and habits of the federal government. However, working primarily with lawyers, we ran into a lot of legal terminology. At first, this was a jargon barrier. What we quickly found was that the more lawyers we talked to, the better we understood their motivations, challenges, and ways of thinking. Quickly being able to adapt to our stakeholders’ natural way of communicating and working while balancing that with our own marketing expertise allowed us to build trust more efficiently and drive impact more effectively. The easiest way to do this was to go through the thought exercise of putting ourselves in our stakeholders’ shoes. How are we currently thinking about a given problem as marketers, and how does that outlook change when we consider coming from a legal perspective? This simple mindset shift helped us to frame up our suggestions in a way that was more directly useful for our lawyer colleagues. On a day-to-day basis, we work with lawyers, technologists, economists, and policy advisors. Being intentional about learning the different styles of your stakeholders will pay dividends throughout your government experience. 
+
+---
+Our PIF journey has been unique in many ways - our backgrounds are more business-oriented than technical, our projects don’t always have defined deliverables, the mission of our agency is long term, and the impact is hard to quantify. But our experience may benefit other “newbies” in federal space as government agencies are mission-oriented, complex organizations filled with people who care deeply about their work. We found that these lessons helped us gain bigger wins while also building meaningful relationships with our colleagues. 
+

_blogs/how-the-u-s-department-of-the-navy-is-delivering-it-that-just-works.md

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+---
+id: how-the-u-s-department-of-the-navy-is-delivering-it-that-just-works
+title: 'How the U.S. Department of the Navy is delivering IT that just works'
+image: /assets/images/blogs/how-the-u-s-department-of-the-navy-is-delivering-it-that-just-works.jpg
+author: Amanda Hawkins
+published_at: "2024-06-10"
+summary: ""
+external_url:
+tags: ['GSA']
+type: Blog
+social: blog
+---
+
+## A case study from the Navy’s Chief Information Officer and Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services
+
+In August 2023, then-acting U.S. Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun shed light on the ongoing efforts spearheaded by the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services (PEO Digital) to improve user experience. In this case study, we’re going to delve deeper into the “why” and “how” behind the Navy’s strategy to drive the delivery of modern, secure, and effective enterprise information technology and business systems and services.
+
+
+## **Setting the stage**
+The Navy’s ambitious goal is to make “information technology (IT) so good it’s invisible” — much like the infrastructure that allows you to turn on a tap and expect to get clean water. This monumental task is long overdue, owing to competing priorities, a historical mindset of doing more with less, and Department of Defense planning, programming, budgeting, and execution processes ill-equipped to support IT infrastructure needs. The outcry for better IT experiences, like the “fix my computer” plea in 2022 from within the Department of Defense, prompted a collective response.
+
+
+## **The Navy’s approach**
+The Navy’s strategy revolves around modern service delivery, a design approach applied across all digital and enterprise services. The aim is to ensure strategic alignment, interoperability, and integration within the Department of the Navy and Department of Defense. The Navy envisions offering the premier enterprise information technology user experience. To achieve this, they started with leaders who would champion the cause, and focused on cultivating a culture shift within the PEO Digital workforce—the team that would be responsible for leading the transformation.
+
+
+## **Culture transformation**
+The PEO Digital team defined the top 10 behaviors (PDF, 172 KB, 2 pages) critical to this transformation. These behaviors are listed verbatim below.
+
+1. Disrupt ourselves with experiments
+2. Use before rent; rent before buy; buy before build
+3. Beta earlier; a 10% solution is better than no solution
+4. Partner bolder and as often as possible; leverage the success of others
+5. Move with urgency and exercise a bias toward speed
+6. Seek simplicity for scalability
+7. Seamlessly deliver customer-centric technologies
+8. Never duplicate, always automate
+9. Reward innovation; make government IT cool to do and boring to maintain
+10. Weaponize data to make better decisions at the speed of relevance
+
+Key enablers of this cultural shift included speed, scalability, simplicity, and alignment. The PEO Digital team implemented measures such as an agile requirements approach, tech scouting, and vendor outreach while streamlining, agile framework execution and product management, and more.
+
+
+## **Aligning strategy to execution**
+PEO Digital has meticulously designed and aligned a process to move from strategy to execution. This involves integrating new capabilities and requirements into the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution cycles. This framework allows effective research, prioritization, delivery, and system sustainment, and connects industry research, Navy mission analysis, and IT business strategy.
+
+
+## **Modern service delivery goals**
+The ultimate goal of modern service delivery is to ensure secure access to services and data from any device, anywhere, without interruptions. They focus on the following elements:
+
+- Devices: Services and data are accessed equally across all devices
+- Network: Multiple connectivity methods for managed and unmanaged devices
+- User: Device, access, and user combinations are verified
+- Application: User-centric services are designed for ubiquitous access
+- Data: Seamless data synchronization across all devices
+- Foundational elements: Visibility and analytics, and automation and orchestration
+
+## **Guidance for modern service delivery**
+For more detailed guidance on their execution, three modern service delivery documents provide necessary insight:
+
+Outlining the technical vision for all PEO Digital IT capabilities: [Modern Service Delivery: Detail, Version 2.6, April 29, 2022 (PDF, 1.4 MB, 18 pages)](https://www.peodigital.navy.mil/Portals/96/Documents/Modern-Service-Delivery-Detail-20220429-rev2.6.pdf).
+Service groups to categorize products: [Modern Service Delivery: Service Groups, Version 2.6, April 29, 2022 (PDF, 2 MB, 25 pages)](https://www.peodigital.navy.mil/Portals/96/Documents/Modern-Service-Delivery-SG-20220429-rev2.6.pdf).
+Technical focus areas with vision and requirements for cross-cutting capabilities derived from multiple services: [Modern Service Delivery: Technical Focus Areas, Version 2.6, April 29, 2022 (PDF, 2.6 MB, 20 pages)](https://www.peodigital.navy.mil/Portals/96/Documents/Modern-Service-Delivery-TFA-20220429-rev2.6.pdf).
+
+
+## **Investment horizons**
+PEO Digital uses investment horizons, a term to identify technology that ranges from emerging innovations to strategic divestments, to manage current investments and expected returns. They’ve established specific criteria for advancements through each horizon:
+
+- Horizon 3: Evaluating: Wide ranging and exploratory work with capabilities funded by external sources
+- Horizon 2: Emerging: Next generation products funded by PEO Digital
+- Horizon 1: Investing and extracting: Enhancing current offerings with PEO Digital funds
+- Horizon 0: Retiring: Decommissioning regardless of organization
+
+## **Pilot programs**
+Pilot programs are at the core of the transition from strategy to execution. They serve as testing grounds for innovative technology and processes, providing a controlled environment to assess feasibility and effectiveness. Priority is given to pilots that are quick to onboard and execute, allowing for smaller investments and hypothesis testing to meet user needs.
+
+<div class="quote-blog"><p>“ If I have to switch back [to my previous computer], you will have to take this computer from my clutching hands. ”</p>
+<footer><cite><p>— Quote from a participant in one of the pilot programs</p></cite></footer>
+</div>
+
+## **Measuring success with world-class alignment metrics**
+PEO Digital emphasizes linking mission outcomes to modern service delivery initiatives. These outcomes are underpinned by user satisfaction and business impact, which are informed by the following metrics:
+
+- Customer satisfaction: Measured by net promoter score (NPS) and perceived parity with industry
+- Cost per user: Tied to time and includes offsets from investments
+- Adaptability and mobility: Informed by the technology’s adaptability and mobility
+- Operational resilience: Focus on data security and system resilience
+- User Time lost: Measuring processing times, workforce hours, and technology implementation
+
+
+## **Conclusion**
+PEO Digital is on a mission to make IT invisible, seamlessly supporting the sailors and civilians critical to our national defense. By fostering a culture of innovation, aligning strategy with execution, and focusing on modern service delivery, they are delivering cutting-edge technology solutions that meet the needs of their users effectively and securely.
+
+
+
+<div class="quote-blog">
+    <p>“ This is the first time in my career that the tools and information tech that I use every day are better at work than at home. ”</p> 
+    <footer>
+        <cite>
+            <p>— Captain Sean O’Lone</p>
+        </cite>
+    </footer>
+</div>
+