{"id":1282,"date":"2015-10-29T18:24:49","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T18:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/industry\/blog\/uncategorized\/toward-a-twenty-first-century-digital-government-2\/"},"modified":"2023-05-31T16:34:22","modified_gmt":"2023-05-31T23:34:22","slug":"toward-a-twenty-first-century-digital-government-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/industry\/blog\/government\/2015\/10\/29\/toward-a-twenty-first-century-digital-government-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Toward a Twenty-first-Century Digital Government"},"content":{"rendered":"
Recognizing that too many government websites and mobile services aren\u2019t working as they should, take too long to develop, or are delivered over budget, last year the White House launched the U.S. Digital Service<\/u> as a way to improve digital government.<\/p>\n
As part of its work, the U.S. Digital Service has created a playbook<\/a> that spells out how digital services should be built and delivered, with best practices ranging from \u201cmake it simple and intuitive,\u201d to \u201cbuild the service using agile and iterative practices,\u201d to \u201cchoose a modern technology stack.\u201d<\/p>\n Since its creation, the U.S. Digital Service has been working with departments across the federal government to build agile digital services. Likewise, its partner 18F<\/a>, a team of designers, developers, and product specialists with the General Services Administration, has begun helping federal agencies deploy twenty-first-century digital tools and services.<\/p>\n These efforts are starting to pay off. From projects that improve services for veterans to the recent\u00a0Federalist<\/a> unified interface for publishing static government websites, the U.S. Digital Service and 18F are creating digital services that improve access to government information.<\/p>\n Efforts such as these along with stronger adoption of DevOps practices show just how far the digital government has come in delivering citizen services. It\u2019s no longer necessary to build large monolithic applications that are complex to develop and costly to maintain. With today\u2019s technology, we can create an agile and cost-efficient development environment in which governments don\u2019t have to recreate the wheel every time they launch a new website or introduce a new mobile service. Instead, they can take a layered approach in which components are reused by other government agencies.<\/p>\n A couple of examples:<\/p>\n Microsoft has contributed to Federalist and some of these open source efforts. In addition, we\u2019ve incorporated some of these same principles into our own DevOps environment, allowing governments to develop, deploy, operate, and maintain digital services with the greatest agility and flexibility. For example, Visual Studio Online<\/a> provides a set of cloud-powered collaboration tools that enable government developers to work effectively on software projects of all shapes and sizes. Developers can create stunning web applications and cloud services for Windows, iOS, and Android working in any language including Java, Python, HTML5, JavaScript, and C#. They can also integrate from virtually any device, platform, or technology stack.<\/p>\n In addition, the Microsoft Azure Government platform<\/a> helps governments meet their goal of serving citizens with great agility. Teams can create and test applications very quickly and cost-effectively, deploy assets and services in an automated and repeatable<\/a> way, and better operate and manage<\/a> their overall IT infrastructure. And they can cut costs and quicken the pace of development by incorporating a variety of\u00a0finished services<\/a> into their offerings.<\/p>\n To learn more about how you can achieve a faster and more predictable application delivery lifecycle, please see our recent \u201cAn Agile Development Platform for Government<\/a>\u201d blog post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recognizing that too many government websites and mobile services aren\u2019t working as they should, take too long to develop, or are delivered over budget, last year the White House launched the U.S. Digital Service as a way to improve digital government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1515],"post_tag":[],"content-type":[1483],"coauthors":[952],"class_list":["post-1282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","content-type-thought-leadership"],"yoast_head":"\n\n