Digital Services Playbook
The American people expect to interact with government through digital channels such as websites, email, and mobile applications. By building digital services that meet their needs, we can make the delivery of our policy and programs more effective.
Today, too many of our digital services projects do not work well, are delivered late, or are over budget. To increase the success rate of these projects, the U.S. Government needs a new approach. We created a playbook of 13 key “plays” drawn from successful practices from the private sector and government that, if followed together, will help government build effective digital services.
Understand What People Need
We must begin digital projects by exploring and pinpointing the needs of the people who will use ...
Address the Whole Experience, from Start to Finish
We need to understand the different ways people will interact with our services, including the ac...
Make it Simple and Intuitive
Using a government service shouldn’t be stressful, confusing, or daunting. It’s our job to build ...
Structure Budgets and Contracts to Support Delivery
To improve our chances of success when contracting out development work, we need to work with exp...
Assign One Leader and Hold that Person Accountable
There must be a single product owner who has the authority and responsibility to assign tasks and...
Bring in Experienced Teams
We need talented people working in government who have experience creating modern digital service...
Choose a Modern Technology Stack
The technology decisions we make need to enable development teams to work efficiently and enable ...
Deploy in a Flexible Hosting Environment
Our services should be deployed on flexible infrastructure, where resources can be provisioned in...
Automate Testing and Deployments
Today, developers write automated scripts that can verify thousands of scenarios in minutes and t...
Manage Security and Privacy through Reusable Processes
Our digital services have to protect sensitive information and keep systems secure. This is typic...
Use Data to Drive Decisions
At every stage of a project, we should measure how well our service is working for our users. Thi...
Default to Open
When we collaborate in the open and publish our data publicly, we can improve Government together...