Looking Forward in Government Technology, Context Is King, Speaker Says

In wrapping up the Center for Digital Government’s GovX Summit 2022 virtual event this month, the chief innovation officer for e.Republic, parent company to CDG,* took a look forward.

Dustin Haisler spoke about the future of what the government technology experience will look like.

Describing a “once-in-a-generation moment we’re in,” Haisler looked forward to the rest of this year, into 2023 and beyond.

“The next killer app for government experience is context,” he said.

He described a ring diagram with three layers of context surrounding citizens, businesses and employees. From the outside in are the infrastructure/data layer, the application/service layer and the experience layer.

The first layer provides self services, the second layer allows more direct interaction, such as paying bills or arranging service. And the third layer requires abstracting complexity, context and data strategy.

“Context is that elusive dynamic that takes us to that next evolutionary jump as we think about the government experience for the remainder of this year, the next year and beyond.”

Context requires a data strategy, including metadata, he said.

The four main types of metadata are:

• Technical/definitional (schemas, data types, models, etc.)
• Operational/descriptive (process outputs, lineage metadata, ETL, performance metadata, etc.)
• Business/descriptive (data tags, classifications, mappings to business relationships, etc.)
• Social/descriptive (metadata about user-generated content, business user knowledge, etc.)

“That leads to the next level of intent and behavioral data,” Haisler said. “We need to start to look at signal capture (and) embedded feedback loops.”

The public sector already captures a lot of data, he said, such as:

• Role
• Properties/business
• Previous interactions
• Email subscriptions
• Location
  

The next steps will require “a different kind of thinking on the future of architecture” that will be:

• Channel agnostic
• API-driven
• Personalized and participatory
• Accessible and inclusive
• Standardized

And achieving balance will require:

• Privacy and data ethics
• Transparency in algorithmic processes
• Compliance to emerging regulations and standards
• Simplicity and conciseness of information

“This is something we can’t do alone,” Haisler said. “We have to do it with partners, we have to do it together and we have to learn together as we go forward.”

*e.Republic is Industry Insider — Texas’ parent company.