by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
Government agencies often build systems with considering other government agencies, not taxpayers, as the customer.<\/strong><\/p>\n I hate to keep writing about healthcare.gov, but the lessons are so obvious. I have to wonder who is in charge and what they are thinking.<\/em><\/p>\n It was the early 1990s, and the management fad of the day was Total Quality Management – TQM. A big part of TQM was satisfying your customer. So, we asked, “who is my customer?”<\/p>\n The answer was simple, “My boss is my customer. If I satisfy my boss, I am rewarded.”<\/p>\n The taxpayer? That person who pays the money for the government to operate? They were too far removed from my world to be considered my customer.<\/p>\n Consider HealthCare.gov<\/strong> – the epitome of a government project that attempts to serve its customer.<\/p>\n The citizen taxpayer as customer<\/strong>: The citizen wants quick information. How much coverage do the different plans provide? How much do the different plans cost? Do I qualify for tax credits to help pay for my coverage? How much is my credit? When must coverage begin? What is the penalty for not having insurance?<\/p>\n Government agencies as customer<\/strong>: The agencies want the citizens’ information: address, name, identifiers, income, family size.<\/p>\n Now look at the site. What happens first? It is clear that the primary customers are government agencies. The citizen taxpayers are secondary.<\/p>\n Serving the public? People first? Not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips Government agencies often build systems with considering other government agencies, not taxpayers, as the customer. I hate to keep writing about healthcare.gov, but the lessons are so obvious. I have to wonder who is in charge and what they are thinking. It was the early 1990s, and the management fad of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,10],"tags":[151,133],"class_list":["post-1522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-people","tag-government","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1522"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1530,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions\/1530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}