Reimagining Government Service Delivery: Insights from the Cross-Agency Life Experiences Roundtable

With co-author Camille Johnson, Senior Consultant, Talent Transformation, IBM

The IBM Center, in collaboration with the Federation of American Scientists and New America’s New Practice Lab, recently convened current and former federal leaders, practitioners, and policy experts to reflect on lessons learned for the future from one of the most ambitious experiments in customer-focused government: the Cross-Agency Life Experiences initiative.

Setting the Framework

The roundtable opened with Amira Boland, who formerly designed and led the effort, framing the concept and purpose of the Life Experiences Organizing Framework—a new model requiring intra-agency and cross-agency collaboration across all levels of government around significant life events and transitions. She emphasized the importance of every effort orienting to a north star principle grounded in a person’s perspective, such as a disaster survivor only having to provide information once at such a challenging moment in life. This seemingly simple goal revealed the enormous complexity of asking multiple federal agencies—each with distinct missions, legal authorities, and cultures—to work together around shared citizen needs rather than organizational boundaries.

Senior Leadership Perspectives

In an executive panel, Robert Gordon -- former Deputy Director of Economic Mobility at the Domestic Policy Council during the Biden Administration -- emphasized that execution "is frequently not the day-to-day priority of leadership" in government, where policy design typically overshadows delivery. Gordon stressed the power of storytelling, noting that connecting people to mission through compelling narratives can overcome organizational complexities.

Fellow panelist Margaret Weichert, former Deputy Director for Management at OMB during the first Trump administration, highlighted structural barriers, including well-intentioned but outdated legal frameworks that are not well positioned to enable asking or addressing what is truly best for citizens. She advocated for asking "what reform is it time for?" in each administration, noting how political realities shape which reforms gain traction.

Lessons from the Field

In a subsequent panel, former Life Experience portfolio leads shared operational insights from implementing efforts across benefits access, maternal health, and disaster recovery. The panelists identified four common themes as takeaways that contributed to their ability to achieve success:

1. The importance of quarterly public accountability to share progress, supported by the central CX team at OMB;
2. The criticality of having dedicated capacity from the cross-agency priority goal funds, the United States Digital Service, and agency commitments;
3. The orientation to a clear goal and outcome, particularly when the Federal government plays more of a convening role rather than direct implementation, as in the case of federally funded, state-administered programs.
4. The critical role of deep, trusted personal relationships and cross-silo (Federal agency, levels of government, and with the private and nonprofit sectors) networks in getting cross-agency work done.

Envisioning the Future

Additional insights were captured through three working sessions that built on each other - beginning with a reflection on insights gained from the efforts begun in 2018 through 2024, considering how federal leaders might redesign or launch comparable future efforts (within or beyond typical constraints), and even reimagining the Life Experiences Framework as a new ethos for organizing government work. Questions ranged from the more tactical -- “What must be structurally true? How might you create authority and accountability? What must be true at various leadership levels (state/local/agencies/White House) -- to the more imaginative -- “How might we take the life experience ethos and expand it? How might we apply this to broader policy domains? How might we rethink Federal/State/Local collaboration and interoperability?”

Participants identified critical preconditions for future success:  privacy and data-sharing reform, hiring flexibility, sustained cross-agency funding mechanisms, and service standards that apply consistently across federal and state-administered programs.

Reimagining

The day concluded with a provocative question from Loren DeJonge Schulman, Director for Government Capacity, Federation of American Scientists: "In your ideal future, what should government be organized around instead of agencies?" Responses ranged from organizing around life events and missions to creating genuine multi-sector partnerships and focusing on resident needs at the local level.

The roundtable made clear that transforming government service delivery in a way that focuses on the needs of the public requires not just better technology or processes, but fundamental shifts in accountability structures, legal frameworks, and how we define success in public service.

Amira Boland and Loren DeJonge Schulman will author a forthcoming report from the three convening organizations, which will provide more detailed findings and recommendations from the session.