At CODE PA, she got to bring user experience and design thinking to bear on IT projects. As CIO, she can apply those principles on an even greater scale.
At the National Association of State Chief Information Officers Midyear Conference in Philadelphia last month, Pardoe described how the state stood up five pilot projects in just eight weeks in response to the federal H.R. 1 bill. The bill’s requirements were confusing for the state employees on the front lines who were trying to help residents navigate services. The pilots, like a benefits checker for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) case management, brought staff from different state agencies to the table together. They also spent time in the field, which further fueled their iterative approach to solving people’s real problems.
While Pardoe admits that not every project can be done in an all-out eight-week sprint, the exercise demonstrates how she approaches IT modernization.
“The hardest thing is peeling away from individual systems and transitioning to service transformation,” she said, “looking end to end across the boundaries of agencies, across the boundaries of funding streams, and really thinking about how we can execute in a way that delivers for humans.”
Video Transcript:
I think honestly the hardest part of modernization is identifying the specific problem that you want to solve.
So rather than saying it's the mainframe that's really challenging or transitioning an application that's been in use forever, I think the hardest part of modernization is peeling away from individual systems and really transitioning to service transformation, looking end to end across the boundaries of agencies, across the boundaries of budget funding streams, and really thinking about how we can execute in a way that delivers for humans.
That's hard because it's pulling apart from the traditional government constructs and really asking all of these teams to think differently about how we design services rather than individual products or systems.
The only pitch in government is a very fast curve ball. We continue to get new policy changes, new legislative mandates, and when you are already pushing an aggressive agenda and a lot of work forward, making sure we can meet the moment for those pieces while also accounting for the work that has to be done, that continues to be a challenge for us day in and day out.
We're tackling that by trying to think about much more modular design in the future. So in that in-between time where we're not all the way there, we will continue to have challenges in those lenses. But I think keeping open lines of communications with the partners that are designing policy and legislature can help us in that regard too.
