GSA Blog

Five Years, Faster Federal Technology

Centers of Excellence (CoE) celebrates important milestone

Happy 5th anniversary to GSA’s Centers of Excellence (CoE)! Our team of experts has spent the past five years helping over 30 federal partners improve and streamline the way government works. A few great examples include:

• Launching AskUSDA, a centralized contact center where the public can get consistent, streamlined information. This ultimately saved USDA $42.5 million, exceeding their goal by $18.7M.
• Working with the CDC to deliver public health data faster through the Health IQ pilot which showed how government can develop secure, tangible solutions with real public health impact. At the same time, the Social Determinants of Health pilot allowed public health data exchanges between CDC and external providers by using cloud-based end-to-end data processing and analytics.
• Working with HUD to use customer research and data analysis to help meet HUD’s equity goals. Specifically, the CoE helped HUD’s homeownership action team with problem-framing workshops and uncovered insights into key building blocks to homeownership. The research also helped communities facing longstanding discrimination in homeownership.
• Improving USDA’s loan assistance tool that directly supports economic relief for American farmers. This tool lowers the barrier of entry for loan applications, helping farmers who need immediate relief by decreasing frustration and explaining what happens next.

Housed within GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), CoE’s six centers and two practice areas help improve the customer experience thanks to expertise in a wide range of processes and operations:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)—discovering insights at machine speed.
• Cloud Adoption—enabling agencies to use cloud based technologies to enhance their digital business capabilities.
• Contact Centers—improving their contact center delivery services and customer interaction.
• Customer Experience (CX)—measurably improving agency relationships with their customers.
• Data & Analytics—establishing customized agencywide data strategies.
• Infrastructure Optimization—modernizing IT infrastructure and reducing costs.
• Innovation Adoption—helping agencies move faster to update their IT by using enterprisewide tools and diverse agencywide change networks while also envisioning future agency IT work models.
• IT Acquisitions—supporting modern and innovative acquisition approaches across government.

The future looks exciting, with 23 CoE projects currently underway across the federal government. And thanks to American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds, we are doing more to support our partners. For example, CoE Resources and Advisory Support is available at no cost to participating federal agencies, and does not require an Interagency Agreement.

Recently, we expanded our footprint in the Community of Practice (CoP) space. We are now providing the following cross-disciplinary and cross-agency designed communities of practice:

• Artificial Intelligence CoP
• Government Contact Center Community (G3C)
• Innovation Adoption CoP
• Customer Experience CoP
• IT Acquisition CoP

Any federal agencies interested in what the CoE offers can contact the CoE Business Partnership group at connectcoe@gsa.gov.