COVID-19 Has Exposed the Need to Invest in Digital Infrastructure

COVID-19 Has Exposed the Need to Invest in Digital Infrastructure

Despite years of modernization efforts, the COVID-19 crisis shows that governments at all levels have failed to adequately fund the social digital infrastructure we need to ensure our well-being.


The first bridges to collapse have been unemployment insurance systems across the country. The Small Business Administration is now similarly unprepared to process the loans many companies need to stay above water.


This crisis is likely to again expose many systems as inadequate to serve the needs of our country. 


Even before the increased demand caused by COVID-19, much of our digital infrastructure was so poorly designed as to be hostile to users. Needlessly complicated user interfaces, unnecessarily probing questions, limited processing hours, incompatibility with common devices and browsers, and frequently offline systems are all-too-common traits of government support systems.


It doesn’t have to be like this. Many of these problems have well-known solutions. As part of the original rescue team for HealthCare.gov, we saw first hand what it takes to turn a failing government system into one that can scale and adopt the flexibility and high-quality user experiences of consumer technology. 


The U.S. Digital Service, 18F, Code for America, and a handful of new digital services vendors have helped forward-thinking career civil servants make progress on these goals, but we need to be honest about how much has changed and how far we still must go to adequately resource critical digital services. 


The vast majority of money spent on technology projects goes to traditional procurements with meticulously planned lists of requirements that routinely fail to create the simple, reliable services the publi ..

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