|||
10x is a venture studio within the federal government. We place small bets on big ideas, use a phased approach to continuously evaluate in-flight projects, and only continue funding if projects continue to demonstrate impact and deliver value.
In 2024 we launched 10x’s first Concept Area, a portfolio of investments exploring new ways to tackle hard problems facing the government and impacting the public. This portfolio approach has enabled us to take a deeper dive into common themes that have come from years of idea submissions.
Our team did a round of preliminary research to review past work and define our first portfolio. After comparing possible paths we decided to focus on ideas that would reduce the burden and cost of government information collection. We dubbed this first set of investments “Tell Us Once.”
Information collection costs the American public and our government billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars each year. We face huge collective financial costs and individual time taxes from having to repeatedly provide the same information across government interactions.
“Imagine a world in which online forms for interacting with governments are pre-completed with all the correct information or where governments automatically initiate services… without any forms or requests at all.“
- Deploying the Once-Only Policy
Members of the public should only have to provide information to the federal government once—and if they consent to sharing that data, other government programs are expected to use it, rather than asking for it again.
After a short discovery sprint we identified more than two dozen product ideas that could address some aspect of the larger information collection problem. We prioritized this first set of investments based on the potential for impact to the public, partnership with agencies, and clear product vision.
We knew from the inception of this work we would need to solve the service experience problems caused by inefficient information collection. We would need to address issues of identity, privacy, and data sharing across federal agencies. These initial bets gave us a way to explore ideas for tackling the larger systemic problem and the individual experience level.
Workstream 1: Combined Applications: Survivor Benefits - Making it possible for people to share the tragic news of a death only once — reducing the burden they face in a time of bereavement.
Workstream 2: Information collection Index: Identifying opportunities for reusing data and simplifying forms within agencies and across the federal government. This index would identify what information was being collected where and opportunities for streamlining.
Our work was accelerated by a partnership with USA.gov which gave us access to their subject matter expertise, activity data, and 10 million users/month. Using their existing research and analytics we kicked off a 2-week discovery and framing sprint.
Inspired by Gov.UK’s Tell Us Once effort that had started with Death Notifications, a common application for survivor death benefits seemed like a great starting point for simplifying a difficult moment in people’s lives.
Discovery sprint activities
Proto-Personas The team used quantitative data from USA.gov’s analytics and qualitative data from survivor interviews to create proto-personas that answered the question of “Who are we trying to help by making it easier to apply for benefits following a death?”
Design Studio
I facilitated a virtual design studio where each team member imagined and sketched multiple ideas for tools and services to help our persona, Emily, navigate the loss of her father. They took each other’s ideas into a second round of visual brainstorming and converged on starting points for possible products.
Prototype and Research
The team quickly developed prototypes from the rough ideas that came out of the design studio. We wrapped up the 2-week sprint with a series of research sessions.
We started with the idea that if we create an easier and faster way for people to let the government know about a death, it will reduce the burden on grieving families. We’ve discovered that the Social Security Administration knows very quickly after most deaths. The larger problem is that families spend a lot of time navigating bureaucracy after a death. The team tested prototypes that combined applications across agencies and potential benefits.
what we learned: As we explored combined applications and integration with VA APIs for service completion, a deeper dive into the applications showed that we had overestimated the size of the underserved market. VA had a tool that served surviving family members and there was little overlap in other federal benefits those survivors were eligible for. With that need met, many of the pain points survivors felt were navigating were private sector systems and beyond our reach.
Pivoting from survivor benefits we revisited data and analytics to identify another time in people’s lives where combined applications could save time and money. Turns out, changing your names after getting married takes a lot of paperwork.
This commonplace activity requires newly married women to fill out a series of forms and applications across government agencies and offices. When those are done, then they still need to change it with banks, bills, employers, utilities, and every other account they have. Creating a single point to change your name across government agencies could save the public millions of dollars and an estimated 35 million hours each year.
The team quickly developed another series of prototypes and technical proofs of concept. Building on these successful experiments for routing name change forms the USA.gov team is continuing on to expand into other combined applications. This is a significant step towards service completion on USA.gov and the site being a one-stop shop for interacting with the federal government.
If we want to reduce the redundancy of government information collection then we need to know what information is being collected. Understanding how people use forms is key to understanding and measuring our impact.
We thought that this workstream could easily create an accurate accounting of all of the federal forms using existing data and help us answer:
The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) requires all information collection requests (ICR) to be approved by Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and, with some exceptions, be posted for public comment. OIRA’s desk officers review forms with a particular eye to removing unnecessary redundancy and burden.
All approved information requests get an OMB (Office of Management and Budget) number and are stored in a database (ROCIS)
Our hunch was that we could make an easy-to-use index of ICRs, this index would let us know what information was being collected by which agency and for what purpose. We also thought that we could use Systems of Record Notices (SORNs) to know where the data from each collection was being stored. Unfortunately, things were not that easy.
Our dive into SORN data quickly revealed that it was not a level detail necessary to connect specific forms and information collections to where the data was stored. We also ran into unexpected challenges with the information stored in ROCIS. Although it contains approved ICRs and all questions being asked, it does not have the forms themselves. ROCIS is focused on compliance rather than indexing, and often contains work-in-progress versions of forms rather than final, properly formatted, easily parsable versions.
What we learned: Without the final versions of forms or structured data about the collections we didn’t have what we needed to make an accurate index.
We realized we could use GSA’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP) to find forms hosted on .gov websites. From the 7 petabytes of data in DAP we could extract quite a bit of information about forms. DAP allows us to quickly identify the most-downloaded forms by actual end-users. Unlike ROCIS, these files are final, production versions.
As a starting point, we built a research prototype that identifies forms among DAP download events and parses the files for more details about them.
Through analyzing downloads on DAP, we have some insight into forms and their usage.
By providing agencies with better tools to track and manage their own forms, we can also achieve better insight into government-wide form usage.
With form files in hand, we can analyze these files to understand their purpose and find redundancies (as well as provide a number of ancillary benefits)
Understanding forms helps us accurately measure the burden of information collection and the impact of our efforts. We are now using the DAP-powered Forms Index to identify key intervention points.It enables our team to measure our progress towards eliminating redundancy and quickly identify the highest impact redundancies in information collection across the government.
The Forms Index prototype is being integrated into 10x’s new Forms.gov platform. It will give agency partners an easy way to track where they are collecting information from the public and give them the tools they need to digitize and streamline their forms’ experience. The Forms.gov platform aims to digitize all federal paper and PDF forms.
The future of many technological investments (and many other efforts) in the Federal Government is uncertain. That said, with our first two bets becoming part of larger ongoing efforts we are now investigating new ideas for improving inter-agency data sharing. We know that cross-agency interoperability is critical infrastructure for any burden reduction scheme to scale. We have begun technical discovery on what it would look like to establish an X-Road Ecosystem here in the US. X-Road was developed in Estonia and is used around the world predominantly in the EU. It is a centrally managed distributed data exchange layer between information systems that provides a standardized and secure way to produce and consume services.
