GSA lays out step-by-step guide for agencies to cut, streamline and automate work

The General Services Administration published a new playbook Wednesday to provide federal agencies and executives tools, strategies and a modern blueprint to automate repetitive tasks and give employees time back to perform mission-critical work.

The Elimination, Optimization and Automation playbook, developed by GSA, builds on lessons learned from federal pilots, mature automation programs and the agency’s own extensive internal enterprise efforts to improve operations.

While a new product, the playbook is already foundational to the agency’s moonshot goal to save and automate 1 million hours of workload for its staff—a goal it’s more than halfway toward achieving, according to GSA Deputy Administrator Mike Lynch.

Yet Lynch said there’s tremendous potential value in taking what’s worked at GSA and “putting those best practices out back to the broader federal government,” with many agencies grappling with similar problems. In this way, he said GSA is serving as a force multiplier for other agencies.

“I think from what I've seen, at least working in government, is so many of the challenges [agencies] are trying to solve are incredibly consistent,” Lynch said in a recent interview with Government Executive. “So there may be unique nuances based on the mission of the agency, but everyone's trying to understand how to deploy technology and use AI and drive efficiencies within our workflows.”

“We just don't have to start from go every time,” Lynch added. “There are learnings that we can provide from our experience at GSA, where we've had a more formalized process that allows other parts of the government to go faster and better. Hopefully, the results we’ve been able to produce through these types of programs makes it compelling and something that other agencies can use as appropriate within their groups.”

An early copy of the 37-page playbook viewed by Government Executive includes best practices based on technology implementation efforts at GSA and a handful of other agencies, including NASA and the Education Department, during this administration as well as the previous Trump administration. Collectively, the handbook “is formatted to follow a typical EOA project through its lifecycle, from ideation to deployment.” 

It outlines a multi-phased approach to EOA projects — opportunity assessments, solution planning and design, implementing and sustaining — as well as an EOA toolkit with tools and templates “to help accelerate your agency’s launch of an effective EOA initiative.”

The playbook lists Lynch, GSA Chief Financial Officer Nimisha Agarwal and Larry Allen, Associate Administrator of the Office of Government Policy as executive sponsors; Chris Grigsby, Executive Director of Digital Finance, Mehul Parekh, Principal Deputy Associate Administrator of OGP, Anthony Cavallo, Division Director of the Business Modernization Division, and program analysts Gabrielle Perret and Will Spelker as EOA subject matter experts; and Andy Stegmaier, President of Management Science & Innovation and Nick Surkamp, Chief Delivery Officer of Management Science & Innovation as EOA playbook authors.

“It is incredible the work the team has done to set this up and provide a top-down framework for the program,” Lynch said.

Once published, Lynch said the next step is evangelizing the playbook across government. Internally, those efforts began with a May 12 Emerging Tech Showcase held at GSA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and attended virtually by more than 2,000 people. The showcase featured several panels on the playbook featuring many of its contributors, as well as panels on GSA’s internal AI-powered chat platform, AI use cases across the agency and an industry-focused panel.

Lynch said he hopes to host a governmentwide showcase with an even larger audience sometime in July.

Other ‘force multipliers’ at GSA

Lynch said governmentwide demand for USAi has increased steadily since GSA launched the shared service to streamline AI adoption last August. Thus far, the agency has inked 24 agency agreements with USAi with 40 more in the works. Another 82 agencies have asked for demos of the technology available on USAi.

“USAi continues to be a really strong platform for us that's meant to be in very similar fashion to the EOA playbook, where we're trying to host and help provide a safe sandbox for other agencies to start to explore how they deploy AI within their workflows,” Lynch said.

Another governmentwide program, OneGov, has generated some $1.15 billion in savings through negotiated discounts on a variety of AI and software tools using the collective power of the entire federal government. More than two dozen companies, including most leading AI firms, are selling their software at a discounted price to agencies through OneGov. In total, nearly 3.4 million users across government have access to that software through OneGov.