Continuing our work with VA OCTO under the CEDAR IDIQ, in 2023, MO was tapped to help tackle the complex issues of sign-in and identity verification. The VA’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) aims to enhance the accessibility, reliability, and security of Veterans’ digital services. With four sign-in credential options, two of which pose accessibility and security challenges, MO has been supporting this objective by migrating Veterans to the more secure identity credentials, Login.gov and ID.me. The team at MO boasts a wealth of expertise in navigating the complexities of identity verification, understanding that identity is multi-faceted and varies across individuals. Leveraging this proficiency, along with our expertise in research and human-centered design, we aimed to facilitate identity verification seamlessly, ensuring that Veterans always have a clear and accessible path to their entitled benefits and services. 

Approach and Methodology

From initial discovery to implementation, MO took an approach to work collaboratively with VA, prioritizing user experience through extensive research, design, and prototype development. Following a model of continuous delivery, we worked towards compliance, user-centered design, and a seamless and simplified sign-in experience.  

• User Discovery: Using behavioral science and human-centered design methods, our UX researchers and design team began the discovery process by conducting interviews with 39 Veterans and 14 VA stakeholders. This approach enabled MO to gain a thorough understanding of the current landscape and user experience from multiple perspectives.
• Defining Key Areas of Opportunity: Drawing from user feedback and iterating on concepts and ideas, the team created the foundational design research, strategy, service design artifacts and service blueprints for 5 key initiatives: 1) in-person identity proofing; 2) Non-Veteran user roles; 3) Security keys; 4) Transition Assistance Program (TAP); and 5) Inherited proofing. 
• Success Through Iteration: Continuing to iterate and test concepts with users, MO prioritized two solutions—modernizing sign-in credentials and an innovative identity verification product and service. During implementation, focus was placed on adherence to standards, user-centered design, ease of use, and providing choices and support for Veterans on VA.gov.

Outcomes & Impact

MO’s efforts on CEDAR Identity have yielded positive, measurable outcomes that enhance efficiency and improve the user experience to meet Veterans’ needs and help alleviate challenges associated with identity proofing requirements. Highlights include:

• Using the insight from the research, we developed 188 concepts that were ideated and grouped into 6 opportunity areas. 
• Building a centralized Identity dashboard, merging MPI, MHV, VA.gov, and Google Analytics data to provide key insights into credential migration. 

• Deployed a communications strategy through an omnichannel service via GovDelivery on VA.gov. This enabled stakeholders to customize updates and campaign messaging within the existing VA.gov digital infrastructure. In testing, tailored communications facilitated modern credential adoption, boosting account creation success. 
• Currently moving from a prototype to a pilot, the In-Person Identity Proofing (IPP) Application will use several of the existing infrastructure and platform offerings including VA.gov and Lighthouse API Gateway. The modern and responsive web application will be accessible across mobile and desktop clients and will include an API layer to support the application front end. Upon successful completion of the pilot, MO will begin work on rolling out the in-person identity proofing service nationwide.

Conclusion

• At MO, we are thrilled to facilitate the transformative impact of CEDAR Identity. By addressing the specific needs of VA in the realm of identity and access, we are paving the way for a more secure, equitable, efficient, and user-centric future across government. 
• CEDAR Identity has enabled MO to demonstrate the following capabilities to ensure continued success: 
  • Commitment to delivering resilient, people-centered solutions by ensuring user satisfaction, compliance, and continuous improvement.
  • A collaborative approach that empowers VA teams and fosters inclusivity.
  • Holistic thinking that considers the entire ecosystem, from user experience to technical infrastructure, ensuring sustainable solutions for the modernization of Veterans’ services.

In July 2023, MO and Digital Foundry joined forces with VA Veteran Experience Services (VES) to launch the CX Catalog project. This partnership sought to meet a vital need by developing an inventory catalog that visualizes IT systems through user journey-based service blueprints. These efforts ultimately enhanced transparency into VA systems and customer experiences to enable more informed decision-making for a diverse range of VA employees. The combination of MO’s human-centered research and design expertise partnered with Digital Foundry’s prowess in technical exploration, system design, and delivery positioned our team to bring success, sustainability, and innovation to the project.

Background & Approach
VA represents a complex ecosystem. Information is not always shared between offices, systems, devices, or applications. This can result in Veteran-facing products that sometimes fail to connect or communicate in a coordinated way, data loss, repetition, and additional burden to the Veteran. With this in mind, MO and Digital Foundry took an approach to problem-solving for VA that was driven by three key objectives:

• Deliver resilient, people-centered solutions by leveraging our team’s 50+ years of collective experience and expertise to serve VA stakeholders with timely, ethical, human-centered, and data-driven solutions.
• Build sustainable solutions by considering the whole ecosystem and illustrating both the external journey of the Veteran as well as the internal processes of VA that support these tasks. This included defining the actions, stakeholders, and systems involved in each step to ensure efficiency and transparency.
• Empower VA to scale modernization by developing a sustainable methodology for creating and storing blueprints to aid future decision making and augment VA teams’ impact.

To kick this work off, a service blueprint for the Medications (Rx) task was prioritized to illustrate the Veteran’s journey and internal processes of VA. To develop the service blueprint, we utilized a co-creation process with the following approach:

• Initial Exploration: Organized workshops to identify the current needs and capture the Rx overview at a high level. This allowed the team to align with VA stakeholders on shared goals and vision for the service blueprint.
• Putting User Needs First: Conducted a series of empathy interviews to understand user needs and pain points. This allowed us to validate the need for a service blueprint.
• Blueprint Iterations: Delivered iterative improvements to the service blueprint at each sprint to ensure alignment and gather feedback.

Outcome & Impact
Within 3 months, we produced a total of six (6) comprehensive service design blueprints that illustrated a Veteran’s journey and VA internal processes. This translated into a growing demand from VA teams to create additional blueprints that support a variety of customer experience improvement efforts. Additionally, these blueprints were immediately used to facilitate meetings and decision making within the VA.

Looking Ahead
The journey thus far has underscored the importance of collaboration, agility, and feedback. As the project continues, our team remains committed to:

• Accelerated Blueprint Development: Leveraging the momentum garnered to produce more blueprints expeditiously.
• Feedback & Iteration: Engage further with VA teams, gather valuable feedback, and refine blueprints in response.
• Fostering Sustainable Change: With the project designed as a set of living documents, the goal is to leave behind a robust, user-friendly blueprint creation methodology to empower future teams to use these tools to tackle Veteran needs head on.

In conclusion, the CX Catalog project stands as an emblem of the synergy between MO and Digital Foundry, working cohesively to enhance the Veteran experience with VA.

NIST has provided digital identity guidelines for federal agencies on best practices for regulating digital identity services and ensuring constituents’ identity and data are protected. NIST 800-63 provides guidance based on the risk threshold that a federal agency, the trusted referee, has and what is required to meet the different levels of assurance. This means that NIST 800-63 offers ways for agencies that require different levels of security to understand how to implement the appropriate assurance for identity proofing. 

What MO and federal agencies have recognized is that NIST seeks opportunities to collaborate in order to refine NIST 800-63 guidelines. This collaboration is an opportunity for the public sector to strengthen the guidance on identity assurance and protection. Currently, NIST 800-63 is working on its fourth revision. 

During the workshop in July, participants were guided through a potential prototype of an in person proofing service. NIST experts and Login.gov Adoption team members engaged in a discussion to understand what touch points in the service enabled a satisfactory threshold of assurance. By partnering with NIST, MO was able to identify the risk and decisions that needed to be made for the in person proofing service to be successful and secure. MO also discovered opportunities to explore alternative forms of identification that would alleviate the burdens on Veterans to verify with NIST’s insights. For example, Veteran Health Insurance Cards emerged as a potential option for identification with proof of address. About 4 million Veteran Health Insurance cards are in circulation and can ensure that identification does not become the roadblock to a Veteran’s identity being recognized and honored. 

Federal agencies will continue to navigate the need to increase protection for its constituents. Agencies like MO are modeling how to best engage with the landscape of digital identity. By collaborating with NIST, MO is able to advocate for how digital identity services that can better meet constituents where they are, while still maintaining the strongest protection. This in turn, can inform NIST 800-63 guideline revisions to protect both the humanity and the identity of those it is meant to serve. 

*Digital identity assurances are digital services to prove one’s identity, also known as identity proofing or verification, and identity authentication of users. We use them every day when we have to provide Face ID to access digital services or provide a member ID to use our insurance. Learn more in our previous article on Identity. 

Yet, in this ever growing digital world, we remember that we are analog beings, and that many are not yet comfortable with technology; in particular the most vulnerable. Federal CIO Clare Martorana’s letter on DX guidance, the last tenet is: “Interact with government in a way that works best for you.”; an acknowledgement that an effective digital experience must work in concert with traditional channels of service delivery. Equating going digital with online self service risks exacerbating the digital divide between those that have and those that have not. We must ensure we are keeping in mind desired outcomes over desired technical solutions.

Team MO has embraced this philosophy and is leading the charge on providing respite to Veterans who seek an alternative to a friction filled online identity verification experience. In the fall of 2022, our team performed  discovery work to better understand how to drive adoption of safer, more secure sign-in services for Veterans accessing online at VA.gov. There are over 2.7 million Veterans that access VA.gov with legacy accounts and would need to migrate.

In this discovery sprint we spoke to 37 Veterans, in-person, as well as dozens of stakeholders and VA employees involved in identity verification for Veterans. These experts at VA warned that mandatory, unsupported migration will leave Veterans behind.

“Any change to login credentials and proofing requirements means some Veterans will lose access—we need to solve for the hardest to reach Veterans (rural, homebound, or unwilling to alter their digital practices), and expect serving them will require special accommodations and additional resources”

With this charge, Team MO is establishing compliant, in-person identity verification channels for Veterans. As part of this endeavor, our team led an in-person workshop discussing in-person proofing with NIST and Login.gov. Our goal in the workshop was to understand how might we pair VA leverage it’s intimacy with Veterans (as an authoritative source of Veteran identity, issuer of Veteran Health ID cards) with the NIST digital identity guidelines to envision an in-person proofing solution that is complementary and can be universally used across federal agencies to online identity verification services. 

“An estimated 60% of those who seek help with in-person proofing have tried to proof online first. The current systems <are> proving unusable for a wide variety of people, not just the elderly or those unfamiliar with technology.”

Veterans do not wake up wanting to verify their identity, it is a necessary step to accessing the benefits they are due. Our vision for in-person proofing is to meet Veterans in moments that matter, when they are already coming to a hospital to receive healthcare, when they are going to a VSO to get help with a benefit application. In fact, why does the Veteran need to leave their home? How might we enable caregivers, who are amongst those that know a Veteran the best, to assert the Veteran’s identity? 

Our team is currently developing an in-person proofing application that will integrate with VA’s modern credentials enabling a Veteran to register for in-person proofing. We are also developing an application to aid proofing agents to provide a seamless and compliant identity verification experiences for Veterans when they arrive at the facility; giving Veterans peace of mind that they are well on their way to receiving their benefits.

Other federal agencies, not just VA, face similar challenges with online identity verification. Our team has designed this service to be extensible to meet multiple use cases and reused across multiple agencies and service providers. In fact, it need not be “in-person” at all; it could apply to video call-enabled identity verification.

In a world driven towards online self-service, our team’s charge is that no one is left behind by providing an attended experience for those that desire. Learn more in our previous article on identity. 

Consider a person’s identity as a parent. There is very little an infant, toddler or child need to be able to identify who their mama or papa is. They won’t even know their name for quite some time, but they will be able to recognize who that individual is. Before you think “Well that really only applies when early in life”, consider when that parent is out with a group of friends, and has just met someone. Typically, the parent just needs to say their name to recognize them as a unique individual the next time they  are out with that same group.

When that group then goes out to a bar to celebrate 6 months of parenthood, someone has to present a credit card with their name to start a tab. Then round after round, that person just needs to indicate that same name to the bartender to get additional drinks over the course of the night. The next day, that same person decides they want to open a new 529 account at a bank for their child’s education. They would need to present more than a credit card; they would need to present a photo ID as well as their SSN. Now, if that same person were to try to get a mortgage to buy a new home for their growing family, they would also need to present a significant amount of additional information regarding their credit history.

It turns out that person is a senior researcher in infectious diseases. When they need to enter a secure, level 5 containment facility at the CDC, they have to present their fingerprint in order to assert who they are.

This brief vignette was centered around the same individual; yet they experienced increasing friction, having to present an escalating number of items to assert their identity. That increase in friction is proportional to the increasing risk of loss when an identity is incorrectly asserted. The risk to a financial institution, for example, is much lower when the person is bringing money in for a 529 account compared to when they are taking money out for a mortgage.

Identity in the Digital Age—Cyber Threats, Data Breaches and Fraud

Now consider identity in today’s digital age, with the increasing prevalence of cyber threats, data breaches, and fraud; it’s crucial to have strong security measures in place to protect sensitive data and resources. Fraudulent actors took advantage of government aid made available during the pandemic, especially aid being disbursed via outdated, legacy systems. The GAO released a report on unemployment insurance (UI) in February 2023. That report estimated that $60 billion worth of fraud occurred when Congress created four new UI programs to support workers during the pandemic.

In June 2022, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo on the federal government’s Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) strategy supporting the Executive Order on Increasing the Nation’s Cybersecurity. One of the pillars of ZTA is to strengthen Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM is a set of policies, processes, and technologies that helps organizations. By using IAM, organizations can ensure that only authorized users have access to their systems and data, and that access is granted according to the principle of least privilege, which means that users are granted only the access they need. The Department of Veterans Affairs, via the Technology Modernization Fund, is strengthening security by making an investment to strengthen identity verification and authentication.

Identity for All—The Give and Take between Security and Equitable Access

However, risk comes in many forms; not just security. Each federal agency delivers services in some form to its constituents. The risk of making those services inaccessible in pursuit of security is real. The Executive Orders on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government highlights the need for the federal government to improve service delivery of benefits to users. 

A balance must be struck between security and access. Controls meant to increase the security of a system can have the unintended consequence of creating insurmountable barriers for legitimate users. On the other hand, lack of security controls may lead to fraudulent actors stealing benefits away from those same legitimate users. The Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government shines a spotlight on historically marginalized communities. These communities are those disproportionately adversely affected by both those security controls as well as most likely targeted by fraudulent schemes.

Embedding  adequate security controls while  managing equitable access to services is as important as it is a challenge. The Paycheck Protection Program, enacted at the height of the pandemic to protect small businesses and its employees, suffered significant losses due to fraud as it was attempting to ensure relief was readily accessible during the global emergency.

Maintaining Access for Millions of Veterans

“They are basically saying <an identity provider> gives you more security, but I don’t know how true that is because I can’t get in to use it.” – Veteran

The VA supports millions of Veterans and has to manage the risk of Veterans having difficulty accessing services while increasing security. Not only do these risks carry financial implications, but may have life and death implications as well. When applying for services, a Veteran has to confirm their identity as one of the earliest steps in the process. As the VA migrates to a more modern identity credential with strong authentication protection to increase security, so does the friction for a Veteran. Whereas before, they may have been able to assert their identity by answering a few questions about themselves; in order to meet higher identity assurance levels, they would now need to present a government issued ID. While presenting identification is definitely a stronger security control; every Veteran has an identity, but not every Veteran has identification. In particular, data shows that marginalized communities are those most likely not to have government issued IDs. Take, for instance, the context of the unhoused. VA has been able to reduce Veteran homelessness by 55% since 2010, but curtailing Veteran homelessness remains a strategic priority for the VA. Someone who is unhoused experiences significant barriers when securing identification. This shows how VA needs to consider diverse strategies as it is balancing trust and access as it modernizes identity credentials that will increase protections for Veterans,.

MO has been collaborating with VA on modernizing its identity credential, taking a Veteran-journey-led approach to our work. We started with an in-depth discovery where we met with Veterans in person to understand their experiences with account access and identity. This discovery yielded a service blueprint – a visual summary of the interactions and what is and needs to be in place to enable a successful and meaningful engagement – that shed light on the pain points and confusion Veterans face when interacting digitally with the VA.

That discovery has informed priorities that Identity Teams at VA are currently working on:

• Establishing paths for Veterans to migrate to a stronger credential while maintaining access to services;
• Creating additional channels, such as complementing digital interactions with interactions in-person, for Veterans to assert their identity;
• Providing strong communications and support for Veterans as VA launches these new capabilities and changes the current ways of doing.

As our MO team tackles these challenges of establishing identity for millions of Veterans, we are mindful that it is an early step in a Veteran’s long journey to access services. We are most effective if Veterans can securely assert their identity and quickly move on to the next step in their journey –with the end goal of securing access to services for themselves and their families.

User journey maps and customer service blueprints provide a visual representation of the entire customer experience, from experiencing a need and the initial contact to post-service interactions. This helps in gaining a deep understanding of the customer’s perspective. Sometimes this can reveal pain points or areas where customers may face difficulties or frustrations. Customer service blueprints, in particular, outline the internal processes and responsibilities to meet customers’ needs and create desirable and sustainable experiences. These tools facilitate better communication and alignment within an organization. They help in breaking down silos by visualizing how different departments or teams contribute to the customer’s journey.

For MO and Digital Foundry, these tools were critical in helping VA develop a more holistic understanding of their IT systems. Utilizing user journey-based service blueprints, they were able to create an inventory catalog that visualizes IT systems. These efforts ultimately enhance transparency into VA systems and customer experiences to enable more informed decision-making for a diverse range of VA employees. The combination of MO’s human-centered research and design expertise, partnered with Digital Foundry’s prowess in technical exploration, system design, and delivery positioned the teams to bring success, sustainability, and innovation to the project.

Now MO and Digital Foundry are partnering again, along with Fearless, to form Team MO and pursue VA’s SPRUCE IDIQ. Bringing over 50 years of collective experience in delivering secure, thoroughly tested, and scalable cloud-based solutions, Team MO is ready to continue serving Veterans.

As government agencies continuously refine delivery of services, in-person and digital, these methods offer the means to accelerate change. But, how do government agencies discern the optimal approach or combination of approaches? Efforts can begin internally, as seen in development of CX capabilities across agencies, such as GSA. Externally, there are agencies that can be contracted to help build those capabilities within.

Team MO represents such agencies. MO, Fearless, and Digital Foundry have partnered together for VA SPRUCE. Across these three teams, their combined experience and skills enable these top three capabilities:

• Resilient, Collaborative, and Human-Centered Solutions;
• Empowering the VA to Scale Modernization through Co-Creating Sustainable Change;
• Fostering a Collaborative Ecosystem for Sustainable Solutions.
  

Emphasizing sustainable solutions through collaborative innovation, click here to see how Team MO brings together the best of lean, agile, and human centered design to foster an ecosystem that nurtures and evolves to meet the changing needs of the VA in anticipation of the SPRUCE IDIQ.

With OMB’s goal of 15% procurement in 2025 for SDBs, this type of investment is critical in building an equitable landscape for businesses to support federal contract work. For federal agencies, contracting SDBs also provides immense benefits:

• Enabling agile digital transformation;
• Allowing diverse talent to enrich federal services;
• Harnessing teams with targeted missions to optimize standard workflows for federal employees without interrupting them.
  By lowering the threshold for access to SDBs and investing in the under-represented businesses, OBM is building a sustainable path of transformation for both government and its constituents.

MO is a SDB that was supported by OMB’s commitment to invest and is now serving as the prime contractor on VA CEDAR IDIQ, enabling increased protection, access, and secure login services to VA benefits and services for over 5 million Veterans. MO is teaming up with fellow SDB’s, Fearless and Digital Foundry, to further its impact by going for VA SPRUCE.

Learn more about this mighty trio, Team MO, here.