18F’s Ed Mullen on Six IT Strengths Government Should Consider

Ed Mullen, a designer working with the General Services Administration’s digital services agency 18F, has said there are six strengths federal and state government agencies should leverage to enhance the delivery of services to citizens, Nextgov reported Monday.

The first strength Mullen wrote on GitHub is having a “loosely-coupled ecosystem of state, federal, and commodity software products, web services and data” designed to empower users.

He said the ecosystem “would have new pieces that are operated by the federal government that states can integrate with and use” and would include the use of commodity tools, microservices and application programming interfaces.

Mullen noted that federal programs in charge of identifying those who are eligible to receive the services should “provide official implementations of eligibility criteria in code that states and others can integrate into their eligibility systems via APIs.”

“Creating an ecosystem of Eligibility APIs would dramatically simplify modernization efforts and move states towards simpler, easier-to-modernize eligibility systems,” he added.

The four other points Mullen cited deal with the collection of data from applicants; client experiences; the use of tools designed to empower eligibility workers to facilitate service delivery and achieve their mission; and the transformation of legacy systems through incremental improvements.