Digital Transformation

Mitigating conflicts: The top government ethics issues where employees seek guidance

Survey data from 143 executive branches informs government ethics shops as to where they should invest time to educate civil servants and political appointees on financial disclosure requirements Financial disclosure is an unenviable, but necessary, annual task for certain government employees. Broadly speaking, those who are in a position to influence how taxpayer money is spent are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest in their personal holdings. As a company, we do a considerable amount of work in this area. Nearly 40 federal agencies have relied on Intelliworx to modernize, customize, and streamline their financial disclosure process. We provide enabling technology that helps ethics offices document, mitigate, track, and report on those disclosures. Although the process of financial disclosure is typically managed by any given agency’s ethics office, the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) strives to keep tabs at a high-level. As part of this work, executive branch […]

Good design and customer experience (CX) is a bipartisan issue we should all get behind

More than aesthetics, good design across websites, apps, and even those arduous government forms, drives efficiency that saves time and taxpayer money by Intelliworx The U.S. government maintains an estimated 23,000 websites. Many are outdated, expensive to operate, and difficult to navigate. For example, less than one in five “federal websites use code from USWDS [United States Web Design System], contributing to inconsistent and varying user experiences.” Further, nearly half (45%) are “not mobile friendly” and only 6% earned a “good” rating for performance on mobile devices. Yet mobile devices are ubiquitous. It’s been ten-plus years since Google searches on mobile devices surpassed those on a desktop. That illustrates how reliant people are on these tools for communication, including communication with their government. That’s the crux of the problem the America by Design initiative aims to solve. A new Executive Order authorizing the initiative sets it up this way: “America […]

11 ways FDonline simplifies financial disclosure requirements for federal agencies

Nearly 40 ethics offices in the federal government use FDonline to make it easier for civil servants to file and for compliance professionals to certify those disclosures and mitigate potential conflicts of interest by Intelliworx Financial disclosure isn’t the most glamorous part of a government job, but it’s incredibly important for transparency. The federal government manages an incredibly large budget – $6.75 trillion in 2024 – and all of it, including borrowing, belongs to the taxpayers. The temptation to influence spending decisions for personal gain is a rare but consequential event. When it does happen, the damage to public trust is difficult to repair, so the government has policies in place to avoid such conflicts of interest. One such policy is the requirement for government employees in a position to influence spending decisions to disclose their personal financial holdings annually. Those holdings are reviewed by their agencies ethics offices for […]

6 generative AI use cases across the federal government

Federal agencies are exploring ways to extract and standardize unstructured data, analyze high volumes of text-based feedback and improve customer experience by Intelliworx Federal agencies spend more than $100 billion annually on technology, including products and services, according to reporting by Jory Heckman. About 80% of that is spent maintaining the sprawling, and in some cases, dated IT infrastructure that already exists. Historically, modernizing those systems tends to be a necessarily slow and methodical process. This is because changes to the IT infrastructure can have unintended consequences. Yet, Heckman, in a story for the Federal News Network, notes, artificial intelligence (AI) may offer a better approach – a continuous, iterative and agile approach. At the time of this writing, 41 federal agencies are exploring 2,133 artificial intelligence (AI) use cases that have been publicly disclosed. As a software company that serves the federal government, we are experimenting with AI as […]

Thought experiment: Consolidating a dozen different federal permitting applications

Manufacturers must apply for permits from as many as a dozen different agencies, adding significant cost and time for everyone; all those forms could be consolidated into one streamlined process by Intelliworx The most impactful government modernization projects streamline business processes and deliver a better customer experience (CX). This has practical benefits, including: reducing the time it takes to complete a business process; bringing transparency and accountability to each step in the process; and automating tasks like reminders and reporting. Martha Dorris, the “godmother of customer experience,” illustrated the benefits it provides for government efficiency in an interview last year. She used the IRS as an example. Tax law is complicated but redesigning the process with CX in mind simplifies the burden on filers. It also cuts the number of help desk calls for the government. Yet such efforts don’t just reduce administrative costs – there’s an immediate benefit on […]

10 senior tech leaders talk AI use in modernization for the federal government

Federal Chief AI Officers say the benefits of AI outweigh the risks, the challenge is finding practical use cases that scale that can be scaled across government IT by Intelliworx The federal retirement management system (RMS) is getting a boost from artificial intelligence (AI), according to reporting by FedSmith. The processing of retirement packets has long been a weak spot for the federal government. There’s a backlog of applications, too. Those applications are all still processed by hand. That typically takes months, and in some of the more complicated cases, can take years. Ian Smith, who penned the piece, reports that the average processing time for the nearly 9,000 retirement packets approved in April 2025 was 49 days. He notes, while AI isn’t being used to digitize old paper records, it is preventing new applications from piling up. The system has reportedly been tested for accuracy and is functioning as […]

SaaS case study: How the Department of Veteran Affairs modernized financial disclosure

The VA capitalized on the success of a small IT project focused on solving a specific technical problem preventing 150 SGEs from filing financial disclosure forms – and used it to modernize the entire process for 13,000 filers and 5,000 supervisors enterprise-wide The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) sometimes employs outside experts. This category of personnel is known as Special Government Employees (SGEs). They are usually employed for 130 days or less and work on specific projects that require their specialized knowledge. SGEs usually maintain outside connections during their special employment – and for good reason. Many put their full-time jobs on hold until a given VA project is complete. Because they maintain these connections, they are required to comply with stringent ethics rules, such as financial disclosure. Any federal employee, including SGEs, who has influence over budget decisions is required to disclose personal financial holdings. These assets are reviewed […]

5 customer experience metrics for savvy federal agencies to prove the value of CX

Here are easy-to-understand explanations of top metrics the federal government can use to measure the success of its investment in CX by Intelliworx Customer experience (CX) is one of those trends that happened gradually over time but feels like it happened overnight. The sudden interest is anything but sudden. The government has seized this trend with vigor and for good reason: technology should enable things to run more efficiently and effectively. For example, merely turning the tens of thousands of government paper forms into a PDF format, is applying analog thinking to a digital world. The static nature of a PDF means every form has to accommodate all possibilities – even if the possibility doesn’t apply to the person filling out the form. This is, in part, behind what OPM calls a “time tax.” By contrast, dynamic forms only ask for the information needed – a recognition that form is […]

Year in review: 20 government tech statistics and numbers that summarize 2024

Federal employee engagement, IT modernization, AI, FedRAMP, CX and telework are among the technology issues summarized in numbers by Intelliworx Numbers are excellent tools for reflection. However accurate or faulty the human interpretation, a number on its own is agnostic. To put it another way, a number alone isn’t inherently good or bad – it just is – it’s just a number. As such, a numbers-driven post is a sound addition to our year-end roundup series. We’ve culled through the dozens of posts we’ve published this year to look back over the numbers. We’ve also done the same with several trade publications that cover the government space looking for such numbers. Below is what we found – it’s effectively a review of the past year in government technology – as expressed by numbers. 1. Federal employees report record engagement (73 of 100) Civil servants gave their employers high marks […]

10 predictions for government technology in 2025

From CX and business process – to telework and the impact of managing technology infrastructure on continuing resolutions – predictions are part forecast and part aspiration by Intelliworx If we set accuracy aside for a moment, if there’s one thing humans do well it’s making predictions. Our brains absorb inputs from our five senses and try to predict what will happen next and how we should feel or act. When things don’t match our prediction, that is our brain’s expectations, we respond with emotions like joy, anger and fear. This means predictions are a physiological part of humanity. It’s fitting then that at the year’s end, we might take a step back and think about our predictions for the next year, 2025. Often such predictions are part forecast and part aspiration. In some ways, predictions are what we hope will happen, based on current information. In both cases, it’s an […]

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