Interview with Dr. Sanith Wijesinghe on Agile Connected Government

So, we’ve divided up our research into three major themes. The first is around improving customer services, which is a big need for our sponsors. They are struggling to kind of meet the same standards that you would expect from a private industry, kind of customer service interaction. The second area is about improving the acquisition process, which again, is one of those things which take a long time to get through, and really is not very agile right now. It doesn’t respond well to emerging threats as agile as we would like it to be.

The third area is an area which kind of spans many different sponsors, in that we’re trying to help them streamline the implementation of new regulations and laws. So, our agencies kind of fit in this space where they’re both the implementer of rules and regulations that are passed in the House or in the Congress, but then they also set regulations for folks downstream, who need to comply against their agency programs. So, having line of sight between all of those moving parts, and having transparency, and making sure those rules get effectively implemented is a big challenge.

So, the research we run essentially aligns to one of those three areas, and we are looking at both the technology layer here, in terms of what are some new tools and applications we can provide, but also span some of the more social, behavioral elements of it as well. You can’t just throw technology at a problem. There’s all these organizational elements that need to also come together. So we are looking at more of an integrated view, in terms of how we can best push the needle along, and sometimes it’s not a technology problem, it’s an organizational issue.

We also try to take a slightly wider lens beyond just kind of how the problem is stated, to include things that might be indirect effects or interdependencies that might come from other interactions beyond just kind of the immediate view of the sponsor agencies. So, it’s this holistic kind of systems engineering view that sets some of the context for our projects.

Yeah, so, you know, each of the major research areas have examples like this. The coming years, I’d say on the acquisition front, we’ve had success this year, kind of collating all the data that identifies different parts of the acquisition process, from characteristics of vendors, the contracts they bid on, the awards that they got. So we have, in that domain, a baseline of data. The next coming year, we are looking at taking advantage of it to build predictive analytics, try to do a bit more forecasting of what kind of contracts work best for what kinds of services, and with what kinds of vendors, so you can start to build a bit more of this kind of proactive decision-making in the acquisition process.

On the customer services side, we have started to prototype voice agents. This is a new customer service channel that’s emerging, where instead of typing of chat boxes, you now can just directly ask question and answers from your sponsors and get answers back. We are hoping to grow those services out further and demonstrate how agencies can take advantage of these systems, which right now aren’t quite at the level of being able to answer kind of complex questions. You can basically ask what the weather’s like or what time your flight’s arriving, but nothing at the scale of, “Am I eligible for a particular kind of benefit?” which is a lot more of a nuanced question. So, excited about trying to deploy that kind of capability with our sponsors.

And going back to our regulations side, as I said, we have now this baseline of what’s connected to what, and the next level is about potentially automating the execution of those policies, using smart contracts and other kind of new technologies.