(2015-04-22) Balter The Difference Between 18F And USDS

Ben Balter: The difference between 18F and USDS. Although similar on paper, the two approach the challenge with two very divergent goals: one was created to ship culture and the other was created to ship confidence. It’s the age-old saga of geeks vs. suits.

The story of 18F and USDS (and their divergence) begins about three years ago with the introduction of the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program. Modeled after Code for America and the Presidential Management Fellows program, the PIF program was designed to parachute 18 skilled, private-sector technologists into government for six-month stints at a particular agency, technologists that wouldn’t otherwise consider a career in government.

The PIF program was a success, and soon after a group called 18F was created within the General Services Administration (GSA) not only to house the PIFs, both physically and bureaucratically, but also to continue and augment their efforts — to centralize forward-thinking technologists in government under one administrative umbrella, and to provide a vehicle for change that wasn’t tied so closely to the administration and the highly political world in which it operates on a daily basis. In practice, 18F attracts the same type of outside-the-Beltway talent that the PIF program was designed to attract, and embodies a similar open-source-first mentality, but unlike the PIF program where many fellows simply took sabbaticals from their private-sector jobs, members of 18F traditionally jump ship and are in federal government for the long-haul, signing up for significantly longer terms than PIFs do.

18F’s secret sauce is that it is insistently dogmatic about collaborating in the open, and after expending a great deal of organizational energy painting a picture of a citizen-centric future and doing their best to inspire agency stakeholders that the way 18F approaches technology is vastly superior to the status quo, they will simply refuse to work with an agency unless the agency agrees to adopt 18F’s culture and workflow, at least for the project at hand.

it’s leading by example, but it’s also the teach-a-CIO-how-to-fish strategy, and for them, culture’s a first-class deliverable right along side the open-source code that that very culture necessitates

many IT executives are life-long bureaucrats, promoted from within the government ranks, with agencies primarily employing what we’d call program managers in the private sector, contracting out the overwhelming balance of development and subject-matter expertise (read: technical know-how) to a small cadre of government contracting firms for both the high-level system architecture and low-level application implementation.

At least in the near term, the US Digital Service exists to prevent the next healthcare.gov.

Unlike 18F, which is approached by agencies asking for help, USDS has a shortlist of administration priorities that it actively pursues. They’re the administrative talking points you’re used to hearing at stump speeches — immigration, veterans, social security, student loans, healthcare, and small business concerns. If it doesn’t fit into one of those buckets, it’s unlikely to get USDS’s attention.

for USDS, the goal is the exact opposite: to prevent a short list of technology-backed policy initiatives from making the news, at least not from a technology standpoint.

USDS’s strategy is to bring best-of-class, private-sector engineers into government for time-limited tours of duty, parachute them into agency positions outside the traditional reporting structure, and task them with bringing a modern perspective to key technology initiatives

demanding that agency CIOs and other technical leads step aside, and they have the political capital to do it. After all, by definition, USDS projects are those already at risk of failure and those that require radical redirection.

I’d break the difference in approaches down to three key value statements implicit in each team’s culture:

1. Transparency as an asset versus transparency as a liability

18F clearly falls in the “transparency as an asset” camp

2. Show versus tell

For 18F, the play is “show”

they’ve got to leave agencies with a Swiss Army Knife of cultural tools so that change agents within the agency can carry the torch forward once 18F leaves. Not to mention, as an engagement-based agency, marketing their efforts is critical to maintaining a pipeline of partner agencies and the political capital it brings

coming from a management-point-of-view, they have the unique ability to change agency org. charts when they need to, placing the technologists they trust in positions bureaucratically that allow them to bypass the “show” step.

3. Management versus hacker

I’ve written before about the distinction between geeks and suits. Nowhere is that more apparent than when you look at 18F and USDS. It’s product delivery versus management consulting

To me, 18F embodies the hacker ethic

For USDS, the play is a top-down reimplementation of how the federal government approaches IT, at least from a human perspective.

Is 18F better? USDS? You’re asking to compare Apples to PCs. They exist to serve different masters, and that’s a great thing