“It caught my eye last week that the Biden transition office had established as a review team dedicated to the U.S. Digital Service. As an organization of only 180 people in total, normally one would not have expected USDS to receive its own review team. That it did so is significant.”
“To be sure, the review team is modest in size, consisting of Matt Bailey, one of the founders of Code for DC (the local branch of Code for America), and Andrew Nacin, who himself worked for USDS for two years during the Obama administration. Additionally, there are five or so USDS veterans on other review teams – which itself shows some success by USDS in one of its larger goals of getting people coming out of the private sector to continue involvement with government after their stints at the agency.
The review team is a signal that USDS will continue and be nurtured…”
“Let me take out my crystal ball and speculate how federal IT will develop over the next four years. The first observation is that it used to be that the IT community was centered on encouraging government to embrace IT, have the issue rise on the radar screen, to get IT more attention — but that this is changing. That battle is now won, and the focus will be changing to doing IT better.”
“I think in particular that will appear in the form of a new emphasis, pushed by USDS, on modern digital practices such as agile software development and user-centered design. I predict this will also lead to a much-increased role for another phenomenon of the last four years, the non-traditional IT contractors who seek to serve the modern digital practice market. Just as USDS has become part of the federal ecosystem, so too have non-traditional contractors…” Read the full article here.
Source: A good sign from the new administration about USDS – By Steve Kelman, November 16, 2020. FCW.
