I am excited to hear USDS is piloting a project with DOI! I hope it's a success and fellow agencies see the benefits of changing the current hiring system. USAJOBS/the federal hiring system is so broken!
How much more red tape if any do you have to cut through to infuse new tech in a government setting over say a similarly sized private company (measuring size by headcount)?
This is a great question. Some laws make it harder to share data between parts of the federal government, for example. That might make spotting fraud, spam, or improper payments harder. At the same time, many folks might not want the government combining data across silos without a strong vetting process.
Or to take another example, there's a misconception that the Paperwork Reduction Act makes it illegal to talk to users: https://medium.com/@ErieMeyer/user-research-is-not-illegal-u... . In that case, the law might be reasonable, but you might have to tackle misconceptions or lore to make forward progress. A favorite hack to make forward progress is to ask "Show me where exactly in the law (or regulation or policy) it says that we can't do this?"
Going back to your question, the U.S. government is one of the largest organizations on the planet: millions of people. Veterans Affairs has about 380,000 employees alone. Meanwhile, Google just passed 100,000 employees.
Is it harder to infuse tech in government compared to a private company? Absolutely. But you also have to grade on the curve that the government is really big. And the flip side of that is that if you make a change in government, the scale means that you can affect millions or tens of millions of people with your change.
I don't think the problem in the government is ever the need for "New Tech", its normally just better application of really well understood tech, that being said for a company of similar headcount ( of which there are few to none ) the amount of tape is similar, but its different in that the government has a few specific rules like Trusted Internet Connections, and Paperwork Reduction mandates that private companies don't deal with. Also the other big difference is everything is done via a contract which brings in a few more stakeholders and often adds in a few restrictions to what can be done ( i.e. sometimes contracts say a specific technology must be used ).
If you have ever worked on a contract with a Fortune-100 company its about the same level of tape