Service transformation and why it’s necessary

Civic technology has gotten pretty good at modernizing forms, making websites more accessible and mobile friendly, ensuring progress is clear and explaining complex processes in plain language. This is important work and there’s still so much need for it.

But service transformation is the work of redesigning how government services actually function, to address why processes are complex in the first place. It means recognizing that you can’t fully solve user experience problems on the front end when the underlying business processes, policies, and organizational structures create inherent complexity.

Take VA.gov, which asks Veterans to re-enter information across different forms and systems. From a purely digital perspective, the fix seems straightforward: build a centralized profile, prefill forms, share data across systems. But the underlying complexity involves data ownership across portfolios within VA, legal authorities for sharing information between VA systems, and questions about data accuracy and Veteran consent.

Addressing this requires policy alignment on data sharing, governance decisions about who owns which Veteran data and potentially legislative changes to enable information exchange within VA. These questions of authority, ownership, and priority are fundamentally political, requiring more than just technology to answer them.

Contract requirements are one place this can be addressed. A contract focused on the digital modernization of one product at VA, for example, could have a greater scope that includes the teams and processes that run the service behind it. This creates the conditions for addressing complexity end-to-end.

Digital teams can facilitate transformation work, design better processes, and build enabling infrastructure, but they can’t solve these problems alone. This means looking for teams who bring expertise in service design, policy analysis, and facilitation, in addition to software development.

The alternative is continuing to treat service transformation as purely technology projects, without addressing process complexity, policy constraints, and organizational silos. Resulting in a modern frontend built on top of the same fragmented foundation.