In September 2020, the TAPP Project welcomed our inaugural class of  Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) Fellows. During the past academic year, the TAPP fellows conducted research on solutions to the public dilemmas of emerging technology. The research ranged from government technical capacity to autonomous vehicles. 

We know government tech projects often fail. Timelines get pushed out, contractors rapidly turn over, costs increase, and, ultimately, public services fail to meet the needs of the American people—often just as they need them most. One of the major reasons for these problems is that the federal government does not have the modern technical talent necessary to deliver large-scale IT programs that consistently work for the end user. This does not just include software engineers, but designers, researchers, and product managers too. In this case study, we’ll look at this issue through the lens of one of the most storied federal IT programs—the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) Electronic Immigration System (ELIS). We found that the program had challenges with its technical talent through the burdensome, nontechnical oversight and the lack of technical expertise on the ground. This case study pulls information from 13 GAO and OIG reports between 2005 and 2021, as well as interviews with 6 current or former senior leaders within USCIS, with a particular focus towards the technical talent associated with the project.

If we want to have a lasting impact on the way that our country serves its people, we need to make the most of this momentum to address the root causes beneath these repeated failures. We need to focus our efforts onto the long-term work of addressing the systemic problems that cause our most critical services to fail when they are most needed. I believe that hiring more in-house technical talent might be a silver bullet to addressing the federal government’s technology problems. In this report, I hope to convince you that we need to make hiring in-house technical talent our number one technology priority in building better digital services.

Fellow Fellow is a new podcast from Harvard Kennedy School's Technology and Public Purpose project. In this podcast, Mark Lerner, a fellow at the TAPP project, interviews his fellow fellows about their research and perspectives on some of the most interesting challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

This is the second series in the Perspectives on Public Purpose blog. 

This is the first series in the Perspectives on Public Purpose blog.