

Nava, a Startup That Wants to Fix the Government's Crappy Design - nkzednan
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/meet-nava-a-startup-that-wants-to-fix-the-governments-crappy-design

======
spangry
I'm a (non-US) federal public servant who worked for a small, and now defunct,
agency with the mandate to embed 'user-centric' design principles in the
creation of public services. At the time we were wound up, I concluded we had
failed. Now I'm less sure. I still occasionally see instances where our work
has influenced other public servants, so perhaps we've had some measure of
longer-term success. You should carefully think about and define your metrics
for 'success', both in the short and long term.

All that aside, the key reason for poor design in government is this: lack of
incentive. And no, the ballot box is not an effective incentive; very few
voters will punish a government because their tax return form was poorly
designed. Private companies possess this incentive: if your product is hard to
use, people won't buy it and you'll go out of business. Government doesn't
have this incentive: if people find your products hard to use, they'll use
them or they'll (eventually) go to jail, won't get their welfare payment,
won't receive a driver's licence etc.

Outsourcing or privatising these kinds of services is not the answer: you're
just substituting a public monopoly for a private one, which arguably leads to
worse outcomes for citizens (and great ones for the private monopolist). This
kind of action only makes sense if a competitive market will form after
government gets out of the way. It's helpful to think of government services
in this fashion: a service market that is dominated by a monopolist.

So that's the problem you are attempting to solve: how do you get a monopolist
with no profit incentive to design better products and services?

~~~
usrusr
Could a setup help with this unfortunate incentive situation, wherein
independent frontend providers would get a small, fixed fee from the state for
each case handled through their systems? They would invariably compete for
users on the usability front. And if those fees (oh no, fixed! Where is that
sacred free market?) turn out too big it would not be as catastrophic as one
may think, because they would not just get filthy rich/reinvest in shady
lobbying (like traditional government contractors, e.g. military technology),
but would put much of the excess money into advertisement, keeping the
bullshit-job flywheel spinning that our postindustrial societies are relying
on to keep an acceptable number of people employed.

I see a few potential pitfalls, but it should be doable and cheap. The meta-
system would have to be balanced between two failure modes. One would be to
allow frontend providers to optimize their revenue by case-inflation, like
making their users run to that virtual tax office more often than strictly
necessary, e.g. by shoddy implementation of corner cases. The other would be
discount providers specializing only on the easy cases, making it
unnecessarily hard for more complete providers to make their living.

~~~
spangry
I've often wondered about similar things, but admittedly haven't done any
formal analysis.

I suspect it's situation specific: there are probably situations where a model
like this would work very well, and others where it would be a terrible idea.
I'm also a little wary of government created 'pseudo-markets', as these often
become bureaucratic nightmares that cost more to administer than if the
government had just done the thing itself. 'Pseudo-markets' are kinda like
machine-learning algorithms: they'll optimise towards your success metric, but
sometimes in unexpected and undesirable ways (i.e. game the system).

Also, for certain services, you'd need to ensure equity of access (i.e. cover
all use cases). Tax returns are a good example. There's some pretty esoteric
stuff in tax returns that are only relevant to a handful of people (e.g.
reporting franked dividends distributed from closely-held unit trusts via an
interposed corporate entity, or whatever). It might never be profitable for a
private market to cover this case, meaning the government would have to
further 'pseudo-regulate' its 'pseudo-market', offer further subsidies, or
cover this use-case itself.

Interestingly, on your second 'failure mode', you could flip it around and
view it as a desirable outcome. Sticking with income tax reporting, most
reporters have pretty simple tax affairs. They just report their annual income
(which the government already knows), maybe claim a deduction or two, and
that's it. But because the government must cover every possible use case,
people are forced to wade through a 40 page form instead of a 1 page form.
There might be more gain to society from doing this:

1) Government offers the fixed subsidy, but makes clear it is only guaranteed
for, say, 2 years. 2) After 2 years, offers a lower (or no) fixed subsidy for
the 'cherry-pickers' (who will still be profit positive) 3) Reallocate the
savings as higher fixed subsidies for the remainder of the market

By iterating this process a few times, the market would naturally segment
according to complexity, allowing the government to accurately 'price
discriminate' on the basis of complexity. I dunno, I'm just spit-balling here,
no clue if this is actually a good or bad idea. What are your thoughts?

Of course, all of this is only possible if the government publishes a 'tax
return' API that's easy to use (i.e. does not create high implementation costs
for private providers). Even though publishing an API sounds (and, frankly,
is) simple, you'd be astounded at how often the government screws this kind of
this up (often by contracting out to IBM, Fujitsu and their ilk). Or not
publish one at all, even though the potential benefits are blindingly
obvious...

~~~
usrusr
I see two differences hidden between much overlap: expert/layman and embrace
constant retuning/embrace creeping detuning. Since we are only taking about
allowing investors to tap into possible efficiency gains in the execution of
bureaucratic processes (and not into actual resource allocation, as it happens
for example in highly regulated but not fully state-run healthcare systems or
in renewable energy programmes), there is a natural upper limit for
disoptimization. So in a way this problem is much easier than other, very
similar regulation/gaming the system scenarios and a loose reins approach
should be less risky.

------
mistermann
> For example, the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs
> spent $1.3 billion on a program to build an electronic health-records
> database and abruptly stopped the project in 2013 after it failed to
> progress as planned. More staggering? In the past 10 years, about 96 % of
> all government IT programs that cost over $10 million were deemed failures,
> meaning they didn't meet their budget, timeline, or user expectations.

If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking
over some of these projects, there are going to be _a lot_ of very unhappy IT
companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.

> A lot of the work we did last year for retooling the Healthcare.gov
> application process was figuring out which questions were necessary to ask
> of everyone and which ones were only necessary for certain people. Instead
> of having one online form with dozens of entry fields on a single page, the
> new Healthcare.gov application process asks a few general questions—like
> income and household size—then directs you to more specific questions based
> on your replies.

Jesus. You'd like to think there'd be some minimum baseline of common sense
required to design an application of this level of importance.

> The newfound optimism about the government's technical future is inspiring,
> but can a 10-person startup really make a difference?

Obviously. You'd almost have to be _trying_ to screw it up as bad as the
original team did, unless this story isn't an accurate portrayal.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
> If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking
> over some of these projects, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy IT
> companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.

While $1.3 billion is a massive amount of money to spend on a project, the
article summarizing that effort as being "an electronic health-records
database" is incredibly trite. This characterization implies "some RDBMS
someplace that holds the information." The scope of trying to bring all
parties involved into a set of computer systems collaborating in workflows
which would make Descartes[1] blush is immense.

Stating that the tens of thousands of people working on that effort are
"riding the gravy train for decades" is naive at best.

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product)

~~~
mistermann
Sorry but as someone with many decades of experience with various levels of
self-interest and corruption, I don't buy your casual "it's a hard problem"
excuse.

> In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost
> over $10 million were deemed failures

Would you have us believe these were _all_ hard problems?

~~~
AdieuToLogic
> > In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost
> over $10 million were deemed failures

> Would you have us believe these were all hard problems?

First, the statistic the article references appear to be from a Computerworld
article[1] which uses "The Standish Group" analysis. This analysis indicates a
96% failure rate for _all IT programs_ costing more than $10 million and is
not limited to "government IT programs." In other words, the article failed to
meet _their_ user expectations of due diligence in representing a pivotal
metric such as this.

Second, as the size of an effort increases in personnel, of course there will
be inefficiencies. Waste, self-interest, and possibly corruption as well. But
you specifically used the phrase "unhappy IT companies that were riding the
gravy train", implying ulterior motives of those organizations and discounting
the difficulty involved in a healthcare records project involved two huge
organizations.

1 - [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2486426/healthcare-
it/h...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2486426/healthcare-
it/healthcare-gov-website--didn-t-have-a-chance-in-hell-.html)

------
navahq
Hi! We don't have a jobs page up yet, so I'll leave this here in case anyone's
interested in working with us (Nava)

Nava | Washington DC* | Experienced full-stack developers/devops/product
manager/operations | On-site - Full Time

We're a small team of engineers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last
year to help fix Healthcare.gov. It turns out there’s a lot more to fix. And
it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people
with a Silicon Valley mindset, deep technical experience, and the willingness
to work closely with dedicated civil servants in government.

Our revamped Healthcare.gov application has been used by millions, converts
35% better, and halves the completion time. The login system we rebuilt is
about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less
expensive; for example, it’s about $70M less per year to operate. We’re just
getting started, and we’ve started Nava to help fix everything else. [0]

People die because the Veteran's Administration is months behind in processing
claims. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to millions of
deceased Americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal IT contracting,
and 96% of projects are deemed failures [1].

That’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently
incapable of doing it right. These are complicated legacy systems and
processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience
who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. You can help
change that.

Our team is 10 people (Stanford, Google, YC alums), and we plan to bring on a
few people every month through 2015.

We’re looking for: \- experienced full-stack engineers \- experienced devops
engineers \- a product manager with a technical background \- a hyper-
resourceful operations person

We have a social mission (we just incorporated as a public benefit corporation
(PBC) this week), but we pay market compensation (above market, for DC) and
equity (above market).

If you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how
our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at jobs@navahq.com.

*Not in DC / able to relocate, but intrigued and in SF? Talk to us.

[1]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t..).

~~~
spangry
I think what you're doing is admirable and just wanted to wish you good luck!
I've been fighting similar battles within government (non-US) and it can be
both very frustrating and very rewarding. Frustrating because 'being right' is
almost never the way to win the argument.

Although I'm terrible at this myself, I've observed that opposition to change
is best overcome by persistence. The best change agent I've worked with used a
particular (and highly effective) technique that I've since termed 'objection
exhaustion'.

He'd hold a meeting of all the 'major stakeholders' (read: people who's stuff
we were messing with, but who's co-operation we needed) once a week/fortnight
to update them on our progress (read: grind them down into submission).

When someone raised an objection to our ideas, he'd listen carefully, take
their concerns seriously and commit to examining the issue and bringing
findings back to the next meeting. We'd then do that, and most of the time
present evidence at the next meeting that showed the objection was baseless
(in a nice, 'give them an out', kind of way). Tedious as it was, by doing this
over and over we'd exhaust all their objections and they'd be forced to agree
with us (or continue to object for no apparent reason and look like a mindless
fool in front of their senior colleagues).

Depressingly, the true but hidden objection is usually "don't touch my stuff"
or "don't reduce my budget". Objection exhaustion works great here: few public
servants are shameless enough to admit, perhaps even to themselves, that these
are the reasons for their opposition.

------
Animats
Fixing it too well may be incompatible with some personal liberties and
privacy. A big problem is that the Government has no really solid way to
authenticate you online. If it did, you'd need to provide far less info when
signing up for something. Some of the Scandinavian countries work that way.

Should the US? Should Government web sites work on the policy that you should
never have to tell the Government something it already knows?

~~~
AdieuToLogic
> Should the US? Should Government web sites work on the policy that you
> should never have to tell the Government something it already knows?

Should is a form of judgement, so I'll weigh mine in if you don't mind :-).

As I am certain you know, while it is technically possible to have government
sites pull up everything known about the citizen given a modicum of uniquely
identifiable information, the US culture would likely produce a tremendous
"big brother is watching us" paranoid kickback. If this is warranted or not is
moot.

For a smaller scale example, some years back the Home Shopping Network (HSN)
made available caller-ID to CSR's for people calling to purchase product. They
still have it now, of course, but at the time it was initially made available,
CSR personnel would greet the caller "by name" when answering. Something akin
to, "Hello Mr. Smith, how may I help you?"

This freaked out a lot of people. Especially the elderly. In any event, as
those of us reading/posting in this forum know, the information is most
certainly still there. Its presence is just not revealed to the HSN consumer.

Put that same type of convenience onto a US government web site and tech-
trolls will light up the web with NSA conspiracy articles ad nauseam.

~~~
Animats
Right. Suppose the Obamacare web site had been _really_ good. You go there,
and it checks your IP address with your ISP, identifies your account, and
greets you with "Hello. It looks like you're Mr Smith of 1234 Scott St,
Raleigh, North Carolina. Is that correct?" The user answers yes, and gets back
"You're qualified to sign up for Obamacare. We've checked your tax records,
and your income qualifies you to get extra assistance. You don't have any
other medical coverage right now. If you sign up, your premium of $42.00 a
month will be deducted from your paycheck from Walmart Inc, along with your
taxes. Do you want to sign up for medical coverage?

Yes, thanks for signing up. You now have medical coverage. Here's your
certificate of coverage. Print this page and you're done.

The screams that would have produced...

~~~
AdieuToLogic
> The screams that would have produced...

From most, not a one I agree.

But from the 24x7 headline-starved troglodytes looking to whip the populace
into a frenzy? Loud and heard from every corner. And what would those which
slavishly follow their pundits-of-choice do? Would they remember the ease with
which they received health coverage or would they incorporate whatever mantra
was beaten into them?

Or am I being too cynical here?

------
stephenhuey
I spoke to one of them on the phone recently and was very impressed! If I
didn't have a couple of other compelling things occupying me right now I'd
seriously consider joining their team in DC pronto. They are preparing to
introduce more government clients to speedy iterations in clean modular
application development and I'm eager to see them continue to impress.

------
datashovel
I think the startup has good intentions, but I think is focusing on the wrong
end of things. With good reason, though, as I don't imagine there's much money
to be made in the areas that really require attention.

My hypothesis is if we had competent (I mean most, not just some) elected
officials in the first place, almost none of the chronic issues would exist to
begin with. Voters need to be far more critical of who we put in office (all
offices at national, state, and local levels).

But how do we educate ourselves on them? We need people working to make raw,
unfiltered data readily available to voters BEFORE they vote so we end up with
a far more productive / capable government to begin with.

------
andrewfong
I'd tolerate the terrible design if the core functionality just worked.
Apparently, you're not allowed to make EDGAR filings on the SEC's website if
it's a federal holiday. Go figure.

------
AndrewMock
Poor government website design is due to every reason regarding the the demand
side, not supply.

See "IDIQ" contracts for more.

------
skrebbel
I'm a bit confused. Are agencies startups too now?

~~~
stephenhuey
The team who was recruited had to work as typical government contractors but
are now forming their own company which they want to operate differently from
all the other companies that build stuff for the government. One of the team
members told me a while ago they were interested in organizing into a public
benefit corporation or something like that (I had never heard of such a
thing).

~~~
navahq
Hi Stephen! Which one of us did you talk to? We did just incorporate as a
public benefit corporation. It's basically a for-profit corporation that also
has a social mission baked into the charter.

~~~
stephenhuey
It was Rohan!

