One of the biggest changes the past few years of living in a pandemic has created is a focus on increasing access to services. Examples include the rapid adoption of telehealth, remote work availability, and online records accessibility. We’ve certainly witnessed the uptick in records access as county governments contact us to automatically redact protected information in their files for secure posting.
Many of those projects were more than just an initiative dreamed up at these counties coincidentally, but tied to funding in the CARES Act, a pandemic-associated funding bill. If there’s a group in the country that hasn’t seemed be able to keep up with changing demands, it’s the federal government. Citizens have struggled throughout the pandemic to be able to get expected levels of service, particularly from agencies with decreasing budgets like the IRS.
With that in mind, the OMB has decided to earmark $100 million from the Technology Modernization Fund’s (TMF) billion dollars in American Rescue Plan funding for the specific purpose of improving customer experiences with the federal government.
Agencies will have until the end of September to apply for the funds and the TMF board, “will prioritize investing in projects that span across agencies and will cut down on frustrating wait times, duplicative paperwork, and bureaucratic barriers people too often face when interacting with their Government.”
This more targeted approach came about to spur investments outside of the standard requests that the Fund had been receiving regarding updates to things like cybersecurity or IT modernization. In fact, since the TMF has been awarding financing, more than half of the projects have been related to cybersecurity. Now, not only is $100 million restricted for customer experience (CX) projects, it’s also the floor, rather than the ceiling, for funding should there be more worthwhile CX projects to explore. The TMF is offering assistance to agencies that lack the expertise to enact CX improvement projects and allows for funds to be spent on commercial solutions as an alternative as well.
The $100 million set-aside falls in line with digital experience priorities championed by the Biden administration through a management agenda and executive order in the closing months of last year. It will nevertheless be up to individual agencies to take advantage of this opportunity.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.