One of the case studies in the report looks at how FEMA streamlined the process of applying for disaster assistance, eventually increasing the percentage of applications placed online from around 23 percent to over 60 percent during Hurricane Sandy, greatly improving service to customers in need of crucial federal government services.
In 2008 FEMA and partner agencies launched DisasterAssistance.gov, allowing users to find information on over 70 assistance programs from 17 agencies and apply and track the status of their applications. That required integrating various application processes and a lot of data sharing among, for example, the Department of Education, the Social Security Administration and Small Businesses Administration.
Program managers put in place a framework allowing FEMA to collect and share application data, ultimately reducing and simplifying the number of forms users have to fill out, and cutting down on overall agency workload, explained the report.
All this has produced some impressive results. According to the report, DisasterAssistance.gov – which is a mobile-friendly responsive site – had over 4 million visitors in fiscal 2013 and registered over 370,000 users, with a satisfaction score of 79 / 100. As the report notes, a key challenge for the program remains dealing with old technology in legacy systems among the agencies sharing information.
Report here: http://ourpublicservice.org/OPS/
