In our research announcement on theories of change (ToC) for digital government, the Digital Service Network shared our belief that all Digital Service (DS) teams should work to develop a ToC.
The Digital Service Network (DSN) spoke with staff from ODX — Megan Evans Seeds, chief digital officer, and Lisa Yang, digital accessibility coordinator — to discuss their efforts to help center digital accessibility across Hennepin County government.
Minnesota is a good example of an organization that started small in its drive to integrate benefits programs. For instance, its recent statewide rollout of its online integrated benefit application website, MNbenefits.mn.gov, started as a pilot in 2020 with Code for America. The pilot encompassed two counties including Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located. The pilot later expanded to four counties, then 16 and a tribal nation. The final roll out, which took 12 months to implement, included the state’s 87 counties and three tribal nations.
In this brief, they present a definition of HCD that is applicable to the context of human services delivery, differentiate HCD from similar design and problem-solving approaches, and describe how HCD is being used in human services.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
The team explored using LLMs to interpret the Program Operations Manual System (POMS) into plain language logic models and flowcharts as educational resources for SSI and SSDI eligibility, benchmarking LLMs in RAG methods for reliability in answering queries and providing useful instructions to users.
The article discusses effective strategies for training government partners in digital services, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing training, setting clear objectives, and fostering mutual understanding and trust.
This workshop guide offers teams an opportunity to jointly work toward understanding core problems impacting digital delivery in their organization. The guide is structured in two parts: (1) a Miro template and (2) a Facilitation Guide.
This session from FormFest 2024 focused on improving service delivery by hearing about work in multiple cities to rapidly digitize service delivery and work by the Department of Veteran Affairs around implementing service design principles in form revisions.
