“Sean Wybenga, informatics specialist for the Food and Drug Administration, said convincing his users that making changes to how they do their work is always difficult, ‘especially when you’re dealing with a doctor or medical professional who’s been doing it for 30 years.’
Wybenga said the way to overcome such resistance, unsurprisingly, is to listen to users and identify what they perceive to be their pain points before making changes. Then, he added, incorporate those pain points and how the solution addresses them when it’s time to train users on the new app or system or platform. ‘Don’t underestimate change management,’ he said…”
“A related problem is finding ways to either incorporate or end ad hoc in-house solutions that different organizations within an agency or department may have created to address a problem, since the people who shape the informal solution are attached to them and resist being told the solution creates more problems than it solves…”
“The vendor community is not always helpful in getting real solutions in place, Wybenga said.
‘A lot of these solutions say, “Hey, we can do these in a month or two.” Sure, you may get it demonstrated,’ but if the vendor doesn’t understand the processes the solutions are intended to address or the structure of the underlying data, they may not scale or fit in with what is happening elsewhere in the process, he said…”
“The panelists did agree that low- and no-code solutions are useful, but not the entire answer.
‘In FDA, that issue is not 100% resolved,’ Wybenga said. ‘With regard to our legacy systems, it was all government-developed … What we do is so unique that the solution needs to be highly customizable. [A] lot of the low-code platforms provide the option. Systems need to talk and be visible to a lot of other systems. It’s a balancing act, [moving toward] commercial solutions.’…” Read the full article here.
Source: Building Out Digital Services Requires Balance and Customer Trust, Officials Say – By Patience Wait, December 2, 2021. Nextgov.
