Eleven years ago, an Office of Management and Budget memo pushed the concepts of Agile and DevOps into the mainstream government consciousness by stating that “the Federal Government has not taken full advantage of this transformation due to poor management of its technology investments.” The promise of Agile DevOps was to get value from digital solutions faster, enable flexibility to support changing priorities, and adapt to future business needs.
Since then, most public sector agencies have created at least a handful of digital products using Agile DevOps methods and toolsets, which largely have delivered these benefits. But, even with adoption of Agile DevOps, some large public-sector digital programs are still experiencing the problems identified by OMB so thoughtfully back in 2010.
Obviously, there is still something missing that could help achieve the benefits described by OMB eleven years ago. Research shows that adding design thinking into IT implementations is the answer.
With its push to provide faster, more predictable and higher quality software, public sector IT organizations may have discounted the need for design. The Agile Manifesto’s principle of “working software over comprehensive documentation” helped move IT implementation to focus on functionality and minimum viable products but also had the negative consequence of suggesting that any kind of focus on design is a wasteful effort that slows down delivery.
On the contrary, methods like design thinking have been shown to save significant time and money in both IT development and post-launch IT support costs. According to Clare-Marie Karat of the IBM T.J. Watson ..
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