Episode 25: Katherine Benjamin on Digital Services
In this episode, Lisa and Andy speak to Katherine Benjamin. Katherine is the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Digital Services at City of New York. Katherine spoke about the challenges and triumphs of service design during the COVID-19 pandemic and offered her insights on the history and future of digital government.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, host, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to Katherine Benjamin. Katherine is the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Digital Services at City of New York. Katherine spoke about the challenges and triumphs of service design during the COVID-19 pandemic and offered her insights on the history and future of digital government.
Lisa Welchman:
Super excited, as you know, because we talked a little bit beforehand about having this conversation, which is a conversation, honestly, I would love to be having in a restaurant over several hours in some great city with some beverages and many courses of food. It's been such a long time since I've seen you and everything seems longer with the pandemic. So thank you so much for joining Andy and I on this podcast, we've got way, way, way too many questions to ask you. You have such an amazing and interesting background that it's going to be hard to narrow it down, but we've skinnied it down to a few starter questions. So I'm going to hand things over to Andy to get started.
Katherine Benjamin:
Can I be awkward for just one second.
Lisa Welchman:
Of course you can.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah.
Katherine Benjamin:
I just need to fan girl really hard. So, Andy, it's so nice to have meet you, but Lisa, when I read her book, I don't even know this is relevant to the podcast, but I just need to say, when I read her book, it was every frustrating, difficult meeting I've had or something that I thought unique to the project I was working on. Suddenly I was like, "Oh, there's a whole book written about exactly the challenges I'm seeing."
Katherine Benjamin:
So I'm very excited to be here in any opportunity to chat with you all because I think in the government space, you'd be surprised to learn it's very similar to what was happening in big organizations. So I am excited for this. And also I'll let you know that you might hear a cat named Humphrey in the background.
Lisa Welchman:
Hi, Humphrey.
Katherine Benjamin:
He likes to jump in and say hello sometimes. So that's enough awkwardness for you me.
Lisa Welchman:
Well there you go.
Andy Vitale:
That's awesome. No, and you might hear my dog too. Who's sleeping. And at some point-
Lisa Welchman:
Where's the other one?
Andy Vitale:
At some point he'll get up. He's never up with me. He's always down stairs.
Lisa Welchman:
Aw! Which one... is it Geraldo Rivera who likes you?
Andy Vitale:
Geraldo Rivera likes me and Gringo is... he's indifferent. So no. Katherine, it's great to meet you. And so thanks for coming on and one of the things that we like to start with is just to let everybody know who might not know who you are a little bit about you and your journey that got you to where you are today.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. Absolutely. Humphrey, stay away from my water. So hello, Katherine Benjamin here currently I'm serving as the Deputy CTO for Digital Services at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer. But I come to government digital things by way of actually government healthcare, digital things. So I started in the non-digital space and was working in a frontline role in a National Health Service hospital, Homerton University Hospital in East London, if anyone's been there or lives in Hackney in that area.
Katherine Benjamin:
And through my frontline work where I was doing outreach with people with complex needs often, in the middle of the night or at what they would call antisocial times of day and getting to know members of the community and try to build bring them into services one can't help but think there are places where sensible and appropriate uses of technology would actually really help this.
Katherine Benjamin:
And so I ended up then working at NHS England, which is the central commissioning body for health services in the United Kingdom, working on their digital portfolio. And what my contribution there originally was, was trying to bring that user centered angle, not necessarily from a design perspective, because that wasn't my background. But from that firsthand experience I had working with patients and understanding where they're sort of getting stuck in the system.
Katherine Benjamin:
So I continued in that space and of course, as a Canadian or someone working in the UK, digital healthcare is very adjacent to digital government because the healthcare system is part of the government system. And so I made that natural transition. So I've also worked in the Ontario Cabinet Office for the Ontario Digital Service and also worked a little bit in startups, at private companies that do digital healthcare. But now I'm back in the government scene in the United States.
Andy Vitale:
I got to work in healthcare for a few you years in my career and it was such rewarding work. So being able to create these services that actually help people and identify opportunities to really drive things forward for people is so great and rewarding. So that was all I wanted to add. Lisa, I know you have a question that will spark more.
Lisa Welchman:
No, no, no. It's all good. I'm just, there's so many things to ask, but one of the things I want to make sure that I ask and it's a little bit self-serving because I care about it a lot was that consolidation of websites in the UK. When we were talking at some other point in the recent past, we brought this up, which was you were involved in that consolidation that was maybe started maybe 20 years ago, which is kind of amazing.
Lisa Welchman:
I remember I had a lot of US federal government clients at the time and you can tell me if I'm wrong, but my fast perception of what was going on at that time was that the UK decided to get rid of all of this cacophony of websites with a different sense of workflow and design or whatever and consolidate everything down.
Lisa Welchman:
It was an aggressive move. Right? And I even wrote about it. I think a blog post called The Second Revolution and I was praising it because I thought that was really amazing. This was before US had a digital office there was nothing like that at the time. And so I'm just wondering if you could talk about that experience and what you did in it and also reflect a little bit, because 20 years have passed. And I would say that governments that I look at who made those types of choices are more successful in service design and more successful in supporting its citizens but that's just my opinion.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
So I'm curious what your thoughts are about that because I think that's a really important thing, particularly with the pandemic and being able to communicate to people effectively.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah, absolutely. I love talking about this topic because I think it's really fascinating when we talk just before we talk a bit about that process. I think if people aren't familiar with digital government one of the things there's a lot of saying in digital government. I forgot a stack of stickers over there that I should have brought handy that have some of our slogans on it, the rally cries the digital government movement. But one of the more common ones is that a person shouldn't have to have an org chart for government to understand how to negotiate a service.
Katherine Benjamin:
As many people know all around the world universally true if you say, have you had a frustrating experience or have you been confused? That's extremely common. Most people I think have had that. And so what happened started happening in the UK and I was just entering the digital government scene after a huge wave of success in terms of this consolidation had occurred.
Katherine Benjamin:
So basically yeah, you're exactly right. That this was part of what the government digital service in the UK also known as gov.uk was championing. It came off the back of it. It used to be called DirectGov. And so there's just a series of lots of websites. And there was a moment in time where there was a huge amount of top down political support where all of these decision makers that's actually entirely untruth. I was going to say, all the decision makers were aligned.
Katherine Benjamin:
There's no universe where all the decision makers are ever aligned, but enough decision makers were aligned that it was decided that having distinct look and feels for different branches of government, where if, because it's very common that you have to go through several branches or ministries or departments, whatever you call it, that all of those disjointed look and feel and service patterns were the befuddling people. And arguably, or quite costly to maintain as they're having to build design libraries for each of these things over and over.
Katherine Benjamin:
So it was decided in the UK, there will be two or technically three, depending on how you want to divide things, websites, anything that's about government services will be on the gov.uk platform and anything that's about health services that's resident or citizen facing will be on the nhs.uk platform. And then they also had this thing with Public Health England, which was for health professionals. So we'll put that aside for one moment.
Katherine Benjamin:
So I worked on the nhs.uk platform and at the time it was called NHS Choices but now it's sort of re ran into nhs.uk and I worked on, it was part of the alpha team doing a bit of that transition. And absolutely that was one of the things that was at the forefront of people's mind was this recognition that people are getting lost within very, very big bureaucracies.
Katherine Benjamin:
And so it definitely tense. And when you talk to different governments, if they've looked at this approach, maybe haven't done it themselves. A lot of people don't love it. Who own different websites, because they think, this means I don't get my own look and feel. This means that I don't get to custom brand my thingamajig, that means that this vision I had for this grand launch of whatever is going to be harder to market because you're really stuck with one set of designs and one set of service patterns.
Katherine Benjamin:
I think there's a lot of pros to it for one is if you're trying to be a small or medium size business, trying to get into working with government, when they publish all of those things online, it's very clear the parameters with which you'll be designing. And for all of us, who've worked in different fragments of government. It's not uncommon that you come into a service and you're like, "Do you have existing design templates?" And none of these things exist.
Katherine Benjamin:
So you're having to like jig a cohesive experience together. So, I'm actually surprised it hasn't been replicated more. I know that it costs a lot of people, a lot of political capital to push for that because it means they consolidated, I believe it was more than 800 websites into gov.uk.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. It was an insane number. I remember seeing that and going like, "Wow, that's a lot of force." When I hear you tell this story, it just... maybe I'm naïve but to me it sounds like someone decided to put the citizen first.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. I mean...
Lisa Welchman:
And not the ego of the organization or the ego of the leaders. And I often wonder how digital makers and digital leaders, because I think it's probably more leaders than it is the actual maker level. And sometimes those are the same. People can continue to make the choice, to put their desire, to have the ego or reputation of their part of the business, their part of the government above what is a comprehensive and easy to use intuitive experience for the user, for the customer.
Lisa Welchman:
And so I often think the only excuses can be, "Well, we are going to get paid anyway. We are the only version of this, so where else are you going to go to file your taxes or get your healthcare or whatever we don't actually have to be good." Is that cynical, do you think? You've been in environments where that's been done and where that's not been done. What do you think some of the reasons are for not getting that work done? I'm looking at it very coldly from the outside and maybe a little bit harshly as well, because I'm not in there, but is it more subtle than that?
Katherine Benjamin:
That's a great question. I think a lot about at one point the Ontario government did a little bit of... I don't know, it was popup testing or they were on the streets in Ontario asking people just the questions as I understand them. And I haven't seen this, I've just heard the second hand was that they were asking people for ex-service like, "Do you know what department runs it?" Because what they were trying to establish is some things like high profile tax things, everyone knows where to go.
Katherine Benjamin:
Like it's part of common knowledge, but there's more esoteric things that you just don't necessarily know where to go. And also like ministries are often reshuffled or rebranded or departments. And so the research basically told them, people are not aware, like unless it's like one of the top five services in government, people don't really know where to go.
Katherine Benjamin:
And I think that's often what's lost on, on some folks because they've been in government thinking about this one area and they have a deep, deep, deep subject matter expertise, but they're less familiar with how you'd manage that digital presence. And so there's an assumption that, "Oh, people will know where to go. They'll know that the point of entry is this place over here." And actually what we see is that's not always the case.
Katherine Benjamin:
Though, if you wanted to... there's a similar story from the gov.uk team and I don't know what product it was, but they described an anecdote where they were under tremendous pressure from a very executive person to put this thing that they felt was not code conducive to the user journey like front and center on this homepage. And there was this whole tension about, do we put it on the homepage? Do we put it on the homepage?
Katherine Benjamin:
And the person was insisting, "We do it." And or they do it. I was not involved. And the people designing the service were like this adds no value to the user. And then someone on the team thought, "You know what, let's just pull the analytics and let's look, is anyone actually going to the homepage?" And they realized that actually the pattern was such that they completely bypassed the homepage. And so it was decided, well, give the person the thing they want on the homepage because actually it makes no difference to our service experience.
Katherine Benjamin:
And that was the compromise they struck. And so it's like both are happy story because everyone got out what they wanted, but also it's like-
Lisa Welchman:
It's sad.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. We also want to move beyond that because we want to have analytics driven discussions. So the final thing I'll add on that is I think it's moving really fast. So that story is like seven years old. Would that happen today? I think often Lisa, about your framework within your book of different types of digital leaders and progressive and conservative digital leaders. And I think you're seeing that leadership also change because digital is such a huge component of leadership in basically any organization at this point.
Lisa Welchman:
So, my last follow on before I stop hogging your time is do you think that the COVID-19 pandemic is going to hit that dynamic anymore? So just this past week, Andy and I were talking about when we're recording this, this is right when the US is trying to figure out who's going to get the booster COVID 19 vaccine, the third one, right? And so Andy had sent me some information and you know, it's all over the news of just sort of the flip flopping and CDC says this and Food and Drug Administration says something else. And the president says that or whatever.
Lisa Welchman:
And there's a lot of confusion about what that may be. And I dropped him a link to the Dutch. I just moved to the Netherlands to the Dutch COVID vaccination dashboard, which is elegant and well-populated and organized smaller country, lots of different reasons why those things can be the same. And it seems like a lot of things online, not everything in the Dutch government are highly organized, but it seems like this is COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity and a use case, right?
Lisa Welchman:
That could show governments how important it is to actually present information in a comprehensive consolidated way to share across departmental information and data sets or as well. From the position of where you are just sort of in the know, talking to other leaders in government, do you think that people are taking some of that lesson from this? Or are they still just trying to tread water and keep their heads above water with all the information around COVID-19 pandemic?
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah, I think that's a great question and at the FWD50 conference in November of 2020, Alistair Croll, who's the author of Lean Analytics had a tweet, it was a provocation. And he said something to the effect of government is really a big tech company, but sometimes they just don't know it yet. And what he was referring to is that yes, almost overnight many, many, many government services.
Katherine Benjamin:
Nobody could see my air quotes there, but there was government services become digital government services overnight. But of course, those of us who work in this space know that how you manage that is like quite different. And so I think that that has resonated that people see the appetite and that this is the direction that it's going. I think depending on where you look in the global digital government movements. And I say movements plural with an S because not everyone follows the same process and is at different stages.
Katherine Benjamin:
And some governments are really, really doubling down on that and you see that in the hiring. If you look at things like the Biden administration has really focused on things like 18F and the technology transformation service, they're really going for this. And then I think others, especially some of the smaller governments that just don't have enough staff to create, just in terms of sheer headcount alone, if you're a very small government.
Katherine Benjamin:
You might not have that organic movement of people within the government saying, "No, this is the way we need to sort of start thinking more about a product management culture and start thinking about our services as an multi-channel experience." And for thinking about the, the background, many of the people who are working in the public service they're often incredibly sophisticated subject matter experts, but if you are an epidemiologist and we saw this a lot in the NHS, you might have 20 years of experience in a thousand publications, but you've never actually managed a digital product.
Katherine Benjamin:
Of course, you could learn it very quickly, but you're usually too busy dealing with a patient like caseload and stuff to do that. I think sometimes it's a bit slower in some organizations to bring in that way of working because it's the transition to product management culture is disruptive. So the appetite is there, the interest is there, the recognition that it's needed is there, but then to... I should really stop talking about your book. It's just because you're right in front of me, but that's one of the things you talking about is like the tension of that and how that organization starts to change. So yes, I don't know if that fully answered your question, but...
Lisa Welchman:
No, no, no. It did. It's always just staggering to me that we're so deeply 30 years into the commercial web and the governmental use of the web and I always say, 'Yeah, it takes 80 years to mature a technology." And so I know that, but I'm still going like, "Yeah, we'd get it better or faster, sooner maybe?" But I guess not, but anyhow, I'm going to I'll stop the hogging and step back for a second.
Andy Vitale:
So you actually joined the City of New York just as the pandemic was hitting. And I'm just curious what it was like walking into lead digital services in one of the hardest hit cities at a time when almost all of the services-
Katherine Benjamin:
This question.
Andy Vitale:
.. how to go to digital?
Katherine Benjamin:
I probably can't speak it in full to that. I can talk about a project about one of the first projects that we worked on. That's very much in the public domain, if that's helpful. So it's project, I'll just tell you what it's about. And you can tell me if you want me to elaborate. But one of the things we had you really quickly is get 10,000 internet connected tablets out to isolated, older adults living in New York City Housing Authority buildings, and how you do that when you're fully remote and only a couple of weeks into a job. So very happy to speak about that one. So let me know.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. Sure. I think that's a fascinating topic and just, what does it look like to even plan that right from actually the moment that you realized that something that had to be done to actually following through and getting everything to execute on that?
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah, absolutely. So I joined the City of New York. My first day of work was March 2020, which was sort of the same day, basically that everybody was being sent home. That was just like random timing. So I started work fully remotely and ended up working remotely for 17 months, like all of my colleagues. So it was a very, very difficult way to start a job, not because it was remote. I've started remote jobs before I started for the Ontario Cabinet Office remotely. But obviously it was an extremely difficult time. And I think it's worth noting that there's the actual nature of the work that's challenging, but also this is an incredibly globally globally traumatic experience. And nowhere was that more true then in New York, in, in the spring of 2020.
Katherine Benjamin:
So it was difficult to come into an organization where everyone collectively is sort of living through something horrific. However, being a digital team we're very well equipped to be flexible. And so one of the first projects that we worked on was getting these 10,000 and internet connected tablets to isolated older adults who are living in New York city Housing Authority buildings. And so when you think about a service design challenge, like that is one of the most...
Katherine Benjamin:
I will continue to use this for many years as an example of end to end service design because you're talking about the product itself, being shipped. You're talking about the unboxing experience, you're talking about to provide multilingual support and all of these things. And so what we ended up doing was the way in which we operated the team would be very familiar to anyone who's worked on a product team. We had a product manager who was trying to keep all of this on track.
Katherine Benjamin:
Of course, we were working with partners across the City of New York. So the New York City Housing Authority NYCHA with working with Department for the Aging to help us identify who the folks would be working with T-Mobile who were providing... they were the people who were shipping and kiting all the devices. But basically what we had to do is come together and quickly do an end to end experience map of like, what is every touchpoint here?
Katherine Benjamin:
One of the challenges was we were moving so quickly that we didn't necessarily know the digital literacy of the person. And we knew it was fairly low, but we didn't know if it was, has never used a tablet ever or has some experience. And the second thing we didn't know is what language they spoke. So what we ended up doing was sort of building the most accessible, possible service we could do.
Katherine Benjamin:
So when the devices were kitted, it didn't look like a tablet would normally look out of the box. We actually had changed the interface. We had very, very few icons. So we used a lot of negative space and we had these print materials that were quite beautiful, that we had included packaged into the boxes so that the sort of basic overall service flow as a person would get a call and they could opt in and consent. People always forget about consent in these processes, but we need to be able to get their address and share their address.
Katherine Benjamin:
So we need them to consent to share their address and that they want a tablet. Then once we have those addresses, we start kiting the device and making sure that everything that's boxed in has beautiful and simple instructions things stickers on the devices in case they lose the instructions that the SIM cards are already in the device that we've had them kits so that they don't have to go through all the Ts and Cs.
Katherine Benjamin:
We had that in a separate user experience pathway. And that when they got these devices, all they had to do was press one button. And that would actually load to a website that we were tracking in terms of analytics. So we could help to see what people are looking at, are they turning on the devices, but also that would walk them through how a tablet works and where to call for help. We did this whole thing over the period of like three or four weeks. And then as part of doing this, we're also calling older adults and trying to do this user research as we go, but moving very, very, very quickly.
Katherine Benjamin:
So it was a really challenging, but really rewarding project. We had consent to share some of the quotes from the people who received the tablets. And it was amazing to see, not only with the people who were working at all hours, trying to get these tablets out fast enough to help them see the impact of the work. Like this is why you stay up till all hours to kit these devices or to make it as perfect as it can be. But also to hear that people were using these tablets to connect with their cardiologist online or with their grandchild online.
Katherine Benjamin:
And that was that point of connection. Yeah, I think it was among my favorite projects that I've ever worked on, although it was very challenging. And then the final thing is behind the scenes, seeing how we were able to use tech in a sensible way I mentioned that we were sort of tracking what people were using on this specialized website we made for this app.
Katherine Benjamin:
But also we had some live dashboards where we were looking at how many devices had been shipped, how many are in transport, how many had been received? And this was our central virtual HQ where anyone working on this project could see the status of anything at any given point because we were moving so fast. We just needed to have this sort of single point of truth. So that is what it felt like to be working at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the City of New York, it was all hands on deck. And there was a lot of collaboration. But I'd say my favorite quote from that project was actually the woman who described using the tablet to listen to music from her youth that she hadn't been able to hear in decades on YouTube and dancing around her apartment, listening to this.
Katherine Benjamin:
And you're like, "If you're isolated at home during..."
Lisa Welchman:
Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah.
Katherine Benjamin:
Isn't it? It brings this whole thing to mind. It was amazing. And actually just as a random aside, I've never had this happen, but as I mentioned, we had consent to share addresses and consent to share details of a quote like that. And actually the Mayor of New York, read out a bunch of the quotes coming out of this initiative because they were so... they just gave you such a powerful mental image. So that was cool for that project, but also cool for advancing the user research practice was in the city, because I think it really shine a light on why it's so important to speak to real humans.
Andy Vitale:
That's awesome. I can't even imagine what the hypotheses were when you first started to like, "We're going to do this and these are the things that we want to learn from it, or these are the ways we want to help people." And then seeing how many different use cases arose from what you did. Aside from that powerful quote, what are some of the other surprises or maybe confirmations about people's behaviors that, that you ended up with come coming out of that project?
Katherine Benjamin:
I think the biggest surprise was under the theme of... so if you have bought something or you're expecting something that you are in the mail, I would say for myself personally, like I'm anxiously awaiting it. If I get a notification from the shipping provider, I'm like, "Oh, it's only two days away or it's coming in this afternoon. I'm excited."
Katherine Benjamin:
One of the things that happened with this project is there were these occasional moments where we're, "Have the tablets arrived? It says it's arrived, but we don't see any... Well, it hasn't been turned on yet." And we were a little bit confused. And then as we started doing the user research, the evaluative user research, some people were saying like, "Oh yeah, it's arrived, but I haven't turned it on yet." And we're like, "But it arrived two days ago." They're like, "Mm-hmm (affirmative), I'm going to turn it on the weekend and today it's Wednesday."
Katherine Benjamin:
And it was such a-
Lisa Welchman:
That's old people.
Katherine Benjamin:
It's just different. So I'd say that was the biggest=
Lisa Welchman:
Patience.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. Something that I do not have.
Lisa Welchman:
I guess not all old people, but yeah. You just, yeah.
Katherine Benjamin:
So I think that was--
Lisa Welchman:
Maybe they were looking forward to it in a different way. They were waiting to have that special moment where they could sit down and really focus on it. Right?
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. That, and I think also one older adult was using it to participate in a gaming experience with their grandchild. And I was like, "That's actually pretty cool." I'm not exactly sure how all the onboarding to that game happened. But yeah. I think we all have expectations about how different people use technology, but the gaming one was, I think one of the cooler stories to hear, as a way of connect with a grandchild. I mean
Lisa Welchman:
That funny because you know when I'm listening to you talk and I'm thinking about how... and I, I guess I can't bring one top of mind right now. Maybe I will, as I blather on, but there's so many things because of the pandemic that uses of technology, people having to work from home, if they were able to do so, some people were just flat out unemployed, but there's so many things that I think people will carry forward. Things that were forced upon them and when you talk about these tablets and you talk about technology in general, in the pandemic, what are some of the things that maybe your teams learned or you think just municipalities, governments, the federal whatever level have learned that they might carry forward. Good practices that were forced on you.
Lisa Welchman:
You're talking about all of this experience and this experience design for folks, it sounds really stellar. Right? And you did it really fast and you did it really well. What are some other things that you think might have come up during the pandemic that will be carried forward?
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah, I think on the whole, for a long time, many governments viewed digital as an extension of just social media. So they think like, "Oh, when you talk about digital, you mean the people who run the Twitter accounts and maybe the website for the thing." Whatever the thing is. And so for many years there's been a slow momentum of depending usually the early adopters who started thinking differently were those organizations often who had a transactional service.
Katherine Benjamin:
Whereas if your service is more knowledge based or behind the scenes, then it might truly be that your digital presence really is just social media and web content. But what I think maybe has been accelerated over the last two years is amongst those in any jurisdiction where they have transactional services. Recognizing that is not as though on one hand and people cannot see me gesturing to the left that you have the service and then gesturing to the right and you have this tech thing that actually they're in an embedded thing that has historically not been the case.
Katherine Benjamin:
More progressive governments like gov.uk. I don't know if they still do this, but they had this idea that at the top of the pyramid, you have the service manager and the service manager owns all channels. So why that becomes important? This is going to be gigantic this example. But if you have a multi-channel experience where a person could be completing a paper form or they could be doing it online, one of the problems were that you wouldn't have an identical, it'd be potentially a set of different questions. It would be so disjointed. And so the digital teams would be trying to make a modern digital experience except ultimately one would need to change the printed form. And historically, one of the things you'd see happening is the person who owned the printed form would be like, "No, it's my printed form. Nothing should change."
Katherine Benjamin:
And then tension ensues and so I think and that's where that service manager role came in. So I think that has been accelerated this recognition that it's not that you design the service first. And then you think about how there might be a digital component starting to integrate some of that. That's certainly not universally true. I hear anecdotes from some part.... well colleagues in other governments and actually Amanda Clark, who's an academic out of, I'm not going to remember what Canadian university she's with.
Katherine Benjamin:
But she's written a really great paper about the Canadian context, which I actually makes the opposite argument that I'm making, which basically says we thought this would accelerate change, but in the context that she was looking at the... what happened was stop gap measures that are slowly being rolled back to the status quo. So some of her argument was maybe we aren't moving as forward as much as we think we are.
Katherine Benjamin:
So that's an interesting article for those people. I think it's in policy options I think is where it's printed, it's publicly available. So there is some of that, but I think on the whole, what I'm seeing is folks beginning to see how the digital component has to be integrated within the broader service as a whole. And then those governments that are successful at that are those that are really thinking about the product management culture that they're bringing into that because in my opinion, it's exceedingly difficult or perhaps even impossible to make that transition without that heavy product management approach. I just don't think there's elegant way to solve that.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. It's challenging. Yeah. I'm sorry, the last I'm going to tag and then I'll stop talking, Andy, is the thing that people forget I'm listening to you to talk is that form, that form, that people version 72.5/9 1972, 72.9/whatever 1986. Whatever that form that people have been filling out forever that exists the organization forms itself around the development of that form. So we're always talking about service design and the citizen service design and the consumer service design and the user.
Lisa Welchman:
And generally what I'm looking at is how hardened org structures are around the product themselves. Right? And that honestly is harder to crack. That's the problem. That's that's the, "I want my face on the homepage." That's the, "We can't consolidate these websites into one." It's not because it's so hard to do. Yes, there are some challenges. It's not that, it's that the organization in all of its power structure is hardened around that artifact. And so that's just what you're saying is just making that kind of blink out in front of me even more. That's really, really hard because that's people.
Katherine Benjamin:
And sometimes it's also as simple as what is an assumed thing becomes entrenched. And then when one questions it, I call it the urban legends where someone's like, "Oh, we can't do it. There's a policy against that." And then it's you mean, that's always-- that's one of the onboarding tips you give people in digital government is it might be that there's a policy, but find the policy because more often than not, there's no policy. It's just that someone has said.-
Lisa Welchman:
It's like team always did it like that. Yeah.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. Or a fascinating one in Canada is with user research, it used to be, there was a time where some jurisdictions would say like, "Oh, we can't do that. We can't talk to citizens. There's like a policy against this." And so we all went hunting to be like, "What? There's a policy against this?" And the hypothesis that I have, I cannot prove, or just prove this. But my theory is, and some of us jointly came to this conclusion is what people might be remembering is that before we go into an election, it's true that you do get notifications if you're government employee, from the government to say, "You know, basically we put a pause on engagement with the public and under no circumstance, should you be engaging with the public." And the purpose of that of course is to protect the integrity of the election because you don't want to be engaging with the public in any way that might accidentally somehow put one political candidate at an advantage over another.
Katherine Benjamin:
So it's true that you do get very forcefully worded messages saying like, "Stop for this period of time." And so our theory is that whenever this user research thing comes up and we get pushback in the Canadian context that maybe what people are just honestly remembering is these emails that come out periodically around elections. And so in good faith, they're trying to say, "No, we don't do this."
Katherine Benjamin:
And then you have to go through a whole exercise of reassuring people that there's safe and appropriate ways to do this within government.
Andy Vitale:
When it comes to creating digital services, there's a lot of teams that are involved, right? There's product teams, there's technology teams, there's design teams, there's research teams, there's legal teams. There's a million teams. When you talk end to service design, just taking a process and making it digital doesn't necessarily make it better. Sometimes it's like, how do we rework the entire workflow and the entire process? But yet organizations want this speed of like, let's just digitize the thing for now. And then we can always figure out how to make the process is better.
Andy Vitale:
So when you are talking to other leaders, like what are some of the conversations? What are some of the trade offs to make them see either A, through a human centered lens and how that kind of goes against the speed that the organization wants, this digital thing just created or this digital version of something that never was digital before? I just want to hear, because there's so many people are having these conversations, not just in government, but in pretty much anything today that hasn't made its way to digital. So anything you can share there is just so valuable.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah, absolutely. There's a great, I mentioned that in digital government, we often have stickers. It's so such a weird convention, but we love it. So there's a set of stickers going around that I believe were made by Hana Schank over at New America to go along with her latest book, but maybe she just retweeted it. But basically the stickers say something more elegant than what I'm about to say. But if you digitize a crummy process, you're are just going to get a digitized crummy process.
Katherine Benjamin:
And so that's I think the main thing about service design that actually this is not what you ask, but I do want to add this that I think sometimes surprises people when it's their first time working with service design or digital teams is because they're expecting it to be like a one for one transition of like paper form equals digital form.
Katherine Benjamin:
And when we say, "No but actually, while we're in there, or like now that we're looking at this whole process, what really ought to do is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And some folks in I think the nicest way are just not anticipating that. And they're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, please don't. I never asked you to touch those things."
Katherine Benjamin:
And that's where some of these tensions come up of. No, no, just digitize the thing to which the service design people will say, "If we just digitize the thing, we'll just have a crummy digital thing." So I think one of, in terms of what can we get quickly in that trade off of substantially and robustly addressing the service design challenge, but also producing something that provides value as soon as possible to the users of that service?
Katherine Benjamin:
I think that's where we get into some of the things you'll see in like the rapid prototyping labs in government or doing some of these sprints to explore. And using co-production and co-design in a sense as it's intended to exist, which is to say, bringing people on that journey to address some of that resistance to the concept of change and doing that through having people participate in user research sessions. So by that, I mean you have someone who owns a whole transaction of some sort and having that person come in and watch the person. An everyday human use that service and maybe have a frustrating experience or used a prototype of what the new service could look like and just see how happy they are. And through bringing those decision makers into the process and helping them see what's happening in the digital factory.
Katherine Benjamin:
That actually is, in my opinion, the strongest, most powerful thing we can do to create change. I'm constantly getting executive people to come in and look and participate, even if it's just for five minutes to watch a real user test. And that I think is the most powerful thing on combination with those same people come to things like shows and tells. And so when I say show and tell what I mean is if you're working in a user... Well, I guess doesn't have to be user centered, but I'd hope it's a user centered agile sprint-based product management culture. If you're doing a show and tell every two weeks or four weeks and having people see the progress and say like, "Hey, we've like 2% solve the problem." And the next time they come, "Oh, we've actually 6% solved the problem."
Katherine Benjamin:
And that these are increments of working product that I think consistently helps people understand what it is we're trying to do, why user-centered design matters, why it's a good thing if we identify a problem in user testing and actually have to take two steps back before we take another four steps forward. Those are the tactic that to your question of what do I see, different digital government teams doing to address this. That's what we're doing is making sure that people understand the process and get to feel included in how those decisions get made. I think that's the most powerful tool that we have. And it's very commonplace, I think in many tech companies and increasingly more common in government teams.
Lisa Welchman:
We've talked a little bit about the impact of COVID, and that's a very specific thing, but just pushing that aside for a second or integrating that in your answer, the impact of that on your answer, where do you see this going? And you can speak as broadly or as narrowly as you want at the municipal level, at the national level, where do you see service design in government going in the next say 20 years? Because that seems like a long time, but the UK thing was 20 years ago. Right? So that time passes very, very quickly.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. I think in the digital government movements plural, we're going to see different pockets going at different speeds. So I think those who've aligned themselves more with the UK approach. Already you're seeing the way you can predict where it's going is who's hiring and what are the jobs. And so when you start to see that a group is hiring 20 service designers or ahead of product, and they're using the word product, not project.
Katherine Benjamin:
That's where you start to see it really changing. I think one of the big questions that remains is for the smaller governments where they're never going to be able to have 50 product managers. It's not like the UK, there are so many opportunities with gov.uk because of... And just to be clear because of the nature of how that's structured, right? It's a national service for over 50 million. That's correct. Yeah. Over 50 million people.
Katherine Benjamin:
So there's the economies are scale there, but if you're in a small local municipality, it becomes really challenging. So I think in those instances, and this is a maybe unexpected answer, but you start to see some of the work coming out of Georgetown University about State Software Collaboratives. So the idea that if you're a small enough jurisdiction and you're solving a problem, that's actually been solved by many, many, many, many other governments, because some things are just like every city does parking tickets for instance, that's a thing. There are these ways in which some of these jurisdictions-
Lisa Welchman:
It shouldn't be, but that's okay.
Katherine Benjamin:
There are these ways that different jurisdictions can band together. And so I think that's also going to be more common because the natural progression is that a jurisdiction thinks, "Oh, I want to advance in this way." And then they look around, they look at their head count, they look at the size of their budgets and they're just never going to be able to put together their own team. And so of course, you can still work with vendors, but there still needs to be ways sort of produce these economies of scale.
Katherine Benjamin:
So I think that's going to be something we see more commonly, but then I think in those bigger jurisdictions, you'll start to see those larger government digital service style teams emerging, where they have an in-house team of experts. And then what I'm hoping we'll also see is that product management becomes something that's owned, not just in technology or digital teams that anyone who's delivering, any sort of service for humans thinks about how they want to manage that product. and that becomes, they start to think of digital as a strategic asset and historically in government that's not always how it's viewed.
Lisa Welchman:
It's after the fact. Yeah.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. Or it's viewed as like the comms channel, but thinking of it. And I think the nhs.uk platform is one of the best examples of that, but that is the single front door for health and care services. And then from there you can get triage to different things, but there's a clear path that they're trying to use to achieve a strategic outcome other than just having comms things.
Katherine Benjamin:
So I'm hopeful that we'll see more of that because ultimately that is a very user centered solution that if it's 3:00 AM and your kid is screaming because they're teething and you're trying to just do this thing that you can quickly do it on your mobile phone, from your couch in your pajamas, that's the end goal that we're trying to get towards. And so the more our leaders start to think about that, the closer we are to get in there.
Lisa Welchman:
So you're in a big city. What comes to mind when I say the word smart city?
Katherine Benjamin:
Well, we just released a big strategy in the City of New York about IoT. So that's always the first thing that comes to mind is all of that stuff. I suggest that everyone read it. It's excellent. It's on our website. I can send you the link about it, but yeah, I think it's going to be a large area of growth. And it's exciting that-
Lisa Welchman:
That's the next 20, 30 years, right?
Katherine Benjamin:
Yes. It's-
Lisa Welchman:
To 50.
Katherine Benjamin:
To quote Robin, not Robin. Alex Bisker, she's with Nava at the moment, but she used to be at 18F she likes to ask this provocation to clients and she says, "Do you anticipate doing less digital work next year than this year?" And you have to think about it for a second, but it's such an interesting question because is there any universe, and for a lot of these things or people think there's going to be less of it next year.
Katherine Benjamin:
And of course, the follow-up is when she's speaking to a client is, so then if the answer is you're going to do more, then what is it you are doing to help support the more doing? So for all of these things, I anticipate that it's going to be a... it's exponential growth at this point.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, that's, that's a really interesting look at the future and what it could be and a digital or smart city, like Lisa mentioned, just what are some of the big challenges that prevent us from getting there, or that you anticipate that will be larger challenges for both large and small cities, but just even for the future that you just described.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. I think there's two things. Firstly, making sure that the jurisdiction has a very strong framework and has thought robustly about how to bring a digital rights and equity based approach to that, because that's not necessarily the first thing that people think of, but you really have to consider that in your plan. And that's been something that New York has really focused on a lot is thinking about how to bring issues of equity and inclusion to these types of technology considerations.
Katherine Benjamin:
I think the second thing is also that there's all of the new, exciting things in the future, but there's also some of the foundational things we still need to talk about. So another joke in digital government is like, sometimes people get frustrated every time you're on a panel and they ask you about the future of blockchain, because you're like, "Interesting question."
Katherine Benjamin:
Not saying it's not important also. So before we get excited about very, very, very future things, there's also a series of more immediate things to consider.
Lisa Welchman:
Can I pay my parking ticket?
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah. So, yeah but I think what's nice about New York specifically is that we're able at the moment, at least in our office, we've been able to do some of that at the same time. So doing very practical. And if you read our IoT Strategy, you can see some of the interesting things that we've done that are really here and now are practical and tangible while also being that balance well with being forward looking. And then also there's some of us who have worked on some of these more foundational elements. So don't know if that fully answered your question.
Andy Vitale:
No, it does. And I've spent a lot of time, both in healthcare and finance and very similar to government when people think of these things, they think of technology stacks that are very monolithic and outdated and the hope for the future is leveraging like API platforms and more modern technology. So what are some of the things that need to be done for companies or governments to change that perception, to give people a little more trust in the technology and especially around data
Katherine Benjamin:
Trusting government systems, you mean?
Andy Vitale:
Yes.
Katherine Benjamin:
Well, I think being able to communicate to people about how their data is being used or helping people to understand what it is that is actually happening is critical because sometimes I think it's a lack of clarity that folks are responding to. So being able to say, "This is your data, this is what you're consenting to. This is what you're opting in and out of." In some ways it becomes a boring design question.
Katherine Benjamin:
When you look at just the opt in language that we use on a government thing about where your data is going and how it's being used and asking yourself, is this language... Actually, I'm sure it's legally valid, but is it also going to make sense to an everyday user when they read that?
Katherine Benjamin:
So I think probably one of the biggest areas is making sure that an everyday person who is processing lots of information and probably isn't waking up every morning and looking on the government website to say like, 'Hey, what's new with my government today?"
Katherine Benjamin:
There are those people, they are awesome, but they're not the majority of users. So thinking about when we have that opportunity to engage with people, how can we make sure that we build trust by communicating a way and having a visual language and also written language that's clear and helps people make sense of things. Because I think where the distrust comes in often is sometimes when people aren't able to discern something or the fragmented nature of something doesn't convey a feeling of trust. And so I recall I worked on a UK tool at point where it was so fractured that you honestly, even as a digital professional, you looked at the actual experience and you actually couldn't tell if it was still the same government journey like it switched at some point.
Katherine Benjamin:
And even as someone who was aware of the service, I thought, "My goodness." My first thought would be, "You've now somehow got onto some sort of spam site."
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, ran away.
Katherine Benjamin:
When actually it's the same tool or it's the same process. So I mentioned that because it's that's where to come full circle. So some of the things we started talking about at the initial outside of this discussion about why sometimes having that consistent branding or that consistent look and feel, or having patterns that seem familiar. That familiarity that brand recognition is actually part of the trust that I think lays that foundation. So that as we do other types of experiences or there's other more complicated things we do that people have a little bit more understanding of what it is that we're talking, because if not the disjointedness or the lack of clarity, I think is partly where people get confused or they're not able to discern what's the fact and what's unknown.
Andy Vitale:
Katherine, it's been great talking to you. Just to be respectful of your time. The things you're doing in the City of New York are super fascinating. How can people stay in touch with what you're doing and you in general.
Katherine Benjamin:
Oh, well you could follow me on Twitter. If you wanted to see what is 99% digital government related tweets. And so you can find me-
Lisa Welchman:
What's the other 1%?
Katherine Benjamin:
Something that made me laugh-
Lisa Welchman:
Okay.
Katherine Benjamin:
... anything, whatever it is that made me laugh out loud, retweet. So I'll share my Twitter handle with you all it's @misskatiebenjamin. But otherwise we keep our nyc.gov/cto website, very up to date. So we have lots of ways to get involved. And if you're actually in New York at the moment, there are some outdoor events that people can attend. So if there's anything that's safe and socially distant, we do talk about that on our website. But otherwise all of these amazing either publications or things that we've done about things like our AI Primer or IoT Strategy and other things, they're all there. You can read them on our website.
Andy Vitale:
Awesome.
Lisa Welchman:
Well, probably by the time this airs it'll be fewer outdoor activities. Are they still doing ice skating? Is that going to happen this year? The outdoor rinks.
Andy Vitale:
I don't-
Lisa Welchman:
I lived in New York for 10 years and so... and my son was born in New York. So there are things to do in the winter outside.
Katherine Benjamin:
That's true. I don't know if they're ice skating, if there is, I would like to do it. It's on my bucket list having only just got to New York, but I don't know-
Lisa Welchman:
That's right you've been in New York all this time and done nothing.
Katherine Benjamin:
Definitely no ice skating in July.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. There you go. Well, we would hope not.
Katherine Benjamin:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
Anyhow, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to talk to us. We really appreciate it.
Katherine Benjamin:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's been fun.
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