Government Bits

Tracking how technology is transforming interaction between governments and citizens.

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This week, with the commemoration of Veterans Day in the US (and Remembrance Day in Canada), we honored those who have selflessly served in our country’s military with honor and distinction so that the freedoms we cherish may endure.

As a veteran of the US Coast Guard,  I am proud to highlight a few of the ways that Adobe is collaborating with Veteran Affairs agencies in North America to improve access for disabled veterans and modernize administrative operations. In many cases, due to gains in efficiency, some resources may be reallocated to the actual care of the veterans these agencies are committed to serve.

• Streamlining workflows for management of benefits claims

US and Canadian VA agencies, including the US Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), have standardized on multiple Adobe solutions, like LiveCycle for BPM, transforming processes to collect, track, and automate the millions of benefits claims they receive every year.

The organizations have since reported reduced data error rates and significant improvements in efficiency throughout their enterprises, achieving the simple goals of fewer administrative delays and more timely service delivery for our veterans.
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• Extending usability of veterans’ health records and other critical information

Considering that most systems of record were implemented before today’s mobile revolution, it’s no surprise that many of them do not natively support remote usability of enterprise information and multi-channel functionality for self-service apps.

Continue Reading  >

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Adobe Acrobat is widely used throughout the public sector, in federal as well as state and local governments, to harness the power of the ubiquitous PDF file format. Yesterday, Adobe marked a new milestone with the release of Acrobat version 11!

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Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM of Acrobat and Document Services at Adobe, further describes some benefits of Acrobat XI in the article below which was originally posted to the Adobe Document Services blog.

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October 1 marks a major milestone for the Adobe Acrobat business. We’re launching Adobe Acrobat XI. Acrobat XI software with cloud services is a powerful new solution that rises to today’s complex document challenges for creating, consuming, sharing and securing PDF content across devices and platforms.

Mobile technology is no longer an optional luxury. Research shows that in 2011 more smartphones shipped than personal computers. Therefore, a truly effective Digital Government requires a strategy that moves beyond merely porting traditional web content to mobile devices. This post will explore why agencies must think about designing mobile service experiences from the citizen in, rather than from the system out; delivering personalized content and applications that are optimized for how citizens expect to use their devices.

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The following article, written by my colleague Garrick Beil, was recently featured in the August 2012 edition of “Policy and Practice,” the magazine of the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA).

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Dissecting the Decision

Yesterday, as the Supreme Court upheld the vast majority of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a couple caveats were highlighted in the court’s ruling. Regarding the mandate, most people understand the law is economically sustainable only if all citizens participate. The court established that the penalty to be paid by those citizens who refuse to acquire health insurance essentially amounts to a “tax.” Therefore, congress was within its constitutional rights to include such a mandate/tax/penalty in the law.  Although to some it may seem the Supreme Court’s ruling was based partly on semantics, ACA proponents declare it a victory since everyone was previously burdened with the shared costs of caring for the uninsured by way of increasing hospital charges and insurance premiums.

The court also ruled that expansion of Medicaid to offer more citizens health coverage may proceed, but without the ACA stipulation that US states that don’t comply would be denied matching federal funding for their original Medicaid programs. So states may now choose whether to participate in the federally-funded expansion.  Note:  the ACA already included a similar provision (Section 1332: Waiver for State Innovation) that allows for states to opt out so long as they offer citizens the same level of quality care at a cost that is equal to lesser than the ACA, but not until 2017.

Looking Ahead

As focus shifts from the law’s credibility to its timely implementation, Health IT will play a prominent role in the delivery of affordable care to more than 30 million new customers. Many provisions of the ACA rely heavily on IT to raise awareness, determine eligibility, manage payments, improve decision-making, measure quality, and more.
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I recently moderated a two-day conference on Government Health IT in Washington DC where Janet Marchibroda, Health IT Chair at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), spoke on the topic.

To anyone passionate about applying technology to drive transformative change and improve the way we live, this week is shaping up to be a tough one to beat in the public sector. It’s been like receiving a gift-wrapped box of energy, laser focused on government innovation and modernization.

Yesterday, President Obama issued a memorandum to the heads of all US executive departments and agencies calling on them to leverage “technological advances to fundamentally change how they serve their customers.”  

The memo, entitled "Building a 21st Century Digital Government," goes on to explain:

“For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different Government programs in order to find the services they need. In addition, at a time when Americans increasingly pay bills and buy tickets on mobile devices, Government services often are not optimized for smartphones or tablets, assuming the services are even available online.”

As a follow-up to Executive Order 13571 (Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service) which he signed in April 2011, the president’s memo also announced the release of a new Government-wide strategy developed to accomplish the monumental goal of enabling “more efficient and coordinated digital service delivery” across all agencies.

Simultaneously, yesterday in New York City at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012, Steven Van Roekel (US Chief Information Officer) and Todd Park (US Chief Technology Officer), launched this landmark initiative to thousands of attendees excited to learn the details.

The comprehensive accompanying strategy, entitled “"Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People", includes a 12-month road map that emphasizes three priority actions:

•  Encouraging agencies to deliver information in new ways that fully utilize the power and potential of mobile and web-based technologies
•  Ensuring the safe and secure delivery and use of digital services to protect information and privacy
•  Requiring all agencies to establish central online resources for outside developers, and to adopt new standards for making applicable Government information open and machine-readable by default

In today’s interconnected global economy, such leadership will likely provide a blueprint for similar international efforts as government enterprises worldwide mobilize to optimize efficiency and offer citizens digital experiences on par with those offered by their private sector counterparts.

To that end, we recently hosted the first annual Adobe Government Assembly (AGA) for Canada. The recent creation of Shared Services Canada, a new agency dedicated to optimizing service delivery, has brought new attention to efforts there to "improve the efficiency of IT services across the Canadian federal government and ensure value for taxpayers' dollars."

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Please join Adobe for its annual Adobe Government Assembly, February 8th, at the National Press Club.

The AGA is a forum for federal, state and local IT, acquisition and security professionals to discuss strategies and actionable tactics for meeting today’s challenges and revolutionizing tomorrow’s government operations. You’ll hear from public sector leaders and industry experts on the key issues of advancing citizen engagement, implementing innovative technologies and protecting critical information.

Keynote speakers include GSA’s David McClure, Associate Administrator of the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, and best-selling author Peter Sims.

Click here to register.

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“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln

A profound quote, but what does it have to do with Customer Experience Management (CEM)? More than you may think.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with government agencies and commercial enterprises around the world that have leveraged Adobe solutions to optimize their customers’ experiences and build “brand” loyalty. From helping their citizens foster online communities and validate program objectives with our Social Brand Engagement solutions, to simplifying complex eligibility determinations with our Selection & Enrollment solutions; these organizations all share a common goal – to provide consumers with engaging digital interactions that deliver measurable results.

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But how much more efficiently would an enterprise operate if it also deployed similar solutions internally to optimize experiences for their own employees? After all, don’t we all serve internal customers in our organizations, regardless of our roles? How much more effective will an agency become as it sharpens its tools by replacing cumbersome paper-based processes with streamlined electronic workflows?
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As Director of the Data Services Division at Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services (OKDHS), James Randell posed those questions to his agency, and then he set out to find the answers. He led the deployment of Adobe’s suite of digital enterprise solutions at OKDHS, his state’s largest agency with over 7,200 employees and 4,000 contractors that span 77 counties. As James put it, the agency was suffering from a “Form-demic,” with almost 1100 unique paper forms that offered low accountability, fragmented tracking, and minimal security throughout the routing process.
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At this year’s annual conference of IT Solutions Management for Human Services (ISM 2011 ) in Austin, Texas, James presented his experiences and shared best practices during a popular session “Advancements in Electronic Forms Technology,” which was moderated by Adobe’s Garrick Beil and packed with attendees, including executives from HHS agencies across the US.

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Afterward, I spoke briefly with James and asked him to expound on the project’s impact on OKDHS, and its resulting effects on operational efficiencies.
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Among the improvements that he noted were quicker response times to bottlenecks and greater transparency. These changes also empowered case managers to effortlessly identify the current status of pending cases.
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As we’ve posted about several times in the recent past (including here and here), the Adobe Gov UK team has been holding a series of webinars focused on the public sector.

The importance of open standards to the future of public sector ICT was the latest topic, for an event that took place on August 31. The event covered whether open standards finally allow the public sector to join up service delivery, what standards are key, and how will they be decided.

The panel included:

• Bill McCluggage, Deputy Government CIO and Director of ICT Strategy & Policy at the Cabinet Office
• Mark Brett, Policy & Programme Manager at Socitm
• Marc Straat, Adobe’s European Head of Standards
• Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, UKauthorITy and IT in Use magazine

An on-demand version of the webinar is now available here; we encourage you to check it out. And to participate in future webinars in the series see the ITU Live registration site here.

As always, keep in touch with the AdobeGov team on Twitter @AdobeGov.

Obviously the answer to that question will vary greatly depending on who asks, and his stake in delivering (or experiencing) an engaging interaction.

CEM for the enterprise is typically associated with substantial benefits, like brand loyalty and competitive differentiation, but those may initially seem like non-issues for so-called entitlement programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and others. That’s because, unlike in the competitive private sector, consumers of these programs often don’t have the benefit of choice.

Many would argue, however, that CEM offers a matrix of far-reaching benefits to any enterprise, some of which aren’t always immediately obvious. Customer communications is a perfect example. Consider the Explanation of Benefits (EOB) form that is sent to millions of Medicaid members in any given month.

Recently, at the 2011 State Health IT Connect Summit, I presented an interactive electronic version of that familiar EOB statement as part of a Health Insurance Exchange demo. By leveraging components of the new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP), recipients of this interactive EOB would be able to intuitively communicate back with its sender from within the document, while maintaining privacy and security of health data.

Now, consider the added convenience for diverse populations where multi-lingual content and responses may be automatically translated by backend processes as the correspondence is exchanged. Customer experience is improved even further as members may effortlessly dispute the accuracy of a claim displayed in that EOB, again from directly within the document.

For the enterprise that sent the EOB, this presents an opportunity to realize significant savings. Overcharges and potentially fraudulent claims that may have otherwise slipped through the cracks may now be identified and investigated, simply by making it easier for members to participate in the process. There are countless other examples of ways that HHS agencies may optimize efficiencies and generate measurable ROI by deploying solutions that strive first to better serve their members.

More often than not, a win-win scenario emerges for everyone as innovative executives are learning that the byproducts of optimal customer experiences include measurable impacts to the bottom line for organizations of all types, in both private and public sectors.

What are your thoughts on this trending hot topic? Let us know in comments and on Twitter @AdobeGov and @AdobeCEM.

We were excited to sponsor and speak at last week’s FedScoop Citizen Engagement and Open Gov Summit at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The event brought together leading federal government and industry experts to discuss the state of open government and solutions to better engage citizens.

There was a lot of great discussion, including the morning keynote from Dave McClure (@drdavemcc), Associate Administrator, Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies at GSA, and closing keynote from Chris Vein, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation, Office of Science and Technology, Executive Office of the President (and, in his previous role with the City and County of San Francisco, the featured speaker at last year’s sf.govfresh event).

Our own Alec Chalmers, vice president of National Government Solutions, also spoke. Alec’s talk was titled “Citizen Experience at the Heart of Agency Missions”. We had a chance to catch a few minutes with Alec directly after the event. Check out the following video for Alec’s take on the event, some of the other speakers and what he covered in his speech.

If you were at the FedScoop event or watched some of the presentations online, let us know your thoughts in comments or on Twitter @AdobeGov.