Transparency in the outcome allows an organization to focus on areas that need attention. In government, these areas most likely exist on different contracts. The government acquisition process makes it easy to fragment requirements but extremely difficult to put back together a cohesive digital experience. Contractual performance metrics end where the team’s responsibility ends. This makes holding individual teams accountable subjective and unenforceable.

Higher level metrics around digital outcomes can orient disparate teams around a common goal. Defining and measuring success should be at both the organization level and the team level. This should go beyond a single pane of glass for IT metrics to actual analysis of consumer impact. For government systems, this means outcomes for missions, citizens, and taxpayers. This is just basic value stream mapping with an eye to the larger, organization level, performance measures.

When measuring, look at both application performance and human performance. Showing that the outcomes of transformation and the inputs of transformation are improving can make the case for bringing along the human elements that are slower to adopt. This is the difference between one team making a transformation and an entire organization making a transformation. Everyone can’t be an A+ developer.

To get from top to bottom, access to governance intent must be scalable and accessible. Unlike written policy, it must be technically enforceable at scale, taking the guesswork out of compliance. As noted above, written policy, while well intentioned, is not a great way to ensure technical outcomes. To see this in action, just look at security compliance policy in government. Policy must be digitally enforceable. It must have measurable standards and a framework for compliance that can be technically measured and, most importantly, contracted for objectively.

As we consider the challenge of digital transformation at scale in government, we have a few basic requirements for the commercial products that make up our stack. They should be aware of one another. They should have strategic overlap. They should complement one another. They should feed the larger picture. They should simplify things equally for executive management and individual developers.

The upcoming Fierce Software workshops begin a series of content with the theme of helping public sector organizations and technologists create an executable vision for success at scale. We will start with three technologies that tackle some of the most difficult issues in government IT: platform management, the continuous delivery part of CI/CD, and measuring success. These tools must be a means to an end, not an end unto themselves. Successful outcomes for missions and citizens must always be the end goal.