Federal Agency Technology Toolbox

Leveraging Innovative Partnerships to Improve Environmental Outcomes

Federal Environmental agencies have a range of options at their disposal to innovate around data and technology tied to their mission goals. These “tools in the toolbox” can help agencies partner with other agencies or industry to make real improvements in data and tech use, bolster urgent tech skill sets, and ultimately accelerate progress across thorny environmental management problems. Below, we’ve compiled insights on how agencies can make use of these tools and what tech providers want them to know.

We’ve focused on three areas with specific recommendations:

1. Prize Competitions

2. Environmental Data Intermediaries

3. Technology Fellowships

Prize Competitions are a widely used tactic within federal agencies; they give innovators unparalleled opportunities to obtain funding for tackling the government's most complex problems. Prize competitions also go way back—and have led to everything from the original design of the White House to the first transatlantic flight. Still, environmental agencies are not fully taking advantage of the flexibility of these competitions to engage with innovators outside of government—and it’s time we reversed that trend. (If you’re curious to learn more about the topic, check out our deep dive on prize competitions here!).
Action Pathways to Incorporate Prize Competitions in Your Agency: Seek out external organizations to facilitate the competition. For agencies where a prize competition role may be difficult to secure, external partners could assist agencies with defining, scoping, and executing prize competitions. This collaborative approach alleviates the burden on federal agencies that may not have the capacity to invest in fully designing prize competitions. Know what resources are available to you. Use the federal challenge toolkit to help you design and set up your challenge—good challenge design is the key to success! Want to see examples? Check out challenge.gov or our recent blog post with Luminary Labs on projects that could benefit from prizes here.

Data Intermediaries can take on a range of tasks, including compiling, curating, and integrating data from various sources; validating the quality of data and identifying data gaps; facilitating stakeholder feedback, and building the data capacity of data providers and end users—all in the name of building trust between data providers and users. Agencies should leverage this unique resource as a way to help extend the reach of their data and tools, with a collaboration-first approach. Learn more about Data Intermediaries here.
Action Pathways to Support Environmental Data Intermediaries:
1) Establish a problem statement, potential solutions, and the purpose of the intermediary itself—this eliminates any confusion over the role of the intermediary and deliverables.
2) Designate partners within your agency who navigate operational silos, partnership dynamics, and organizational politics—this will reduce communication barriers around data-sharing within the agency.
3) Consider funding aspects of an intermediary's work—Intermediaries must secure funding or in-kind resources to support the backbone of the collaboration; many mobilize government resources, especially to support underlying science. The National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, has been known to fund such endeavors.
4) Participate in the governance of projects and their data.

Environmental agencies need key skill sets to help design and evaluate data and systems that are crucial for communicating, prioritizing, and accelerating their work. Across the board, older digital infrastructure costs the federal government $337 million annually to maintain. To address those talent and infrastructure gaps, agencies across the government need to leverage the expertise of technologists to truly move the needle and seize some of the biggest opportunities for user-centered change. Technology fellowships are a good way to start building capacity. For more on the topic, check out our work on tech capacity, the use of Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIFs) in environmental agencies, and environmental chief data officers(CDOs).
Action Pathways to Take Advantage of Fellowships and Bolster Team Capacity:
Consider what skill sets your program needs: The Tech Talent Project has a variety of resources for government agencies outlining the skills needed to better leverage data and technology. In some cases, technical skill sets are not the only need—for example, our interviews with environmental data leaders identified strategic communications as a key need within and between agencies.
Use existing fellowship programs to your advantage: Resources like Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIFs) and the U.S Digital Corps offer two-year full-time positions for workers with skills in areas like software engineering, data science and analytics, product management, design, and cybersecurity. Make use of them! Fellowships are also available through a wide range of nonprofits, such as the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council also created a resource for active tech fellowships across the government, ranging from early career experience levels to more senior roles.

Are you interested in learning more about these tools or EPIC’s work with federal agencies?

We want to hear from you.

What Tech Providers Want You To Know

Utilizing improved, user-centered technology in support of agency missions represents a major opportunity to accelerate progress toward our nation’s environmental goals. To take full advantage of that opportunity, government agencies need to partner with a robust ecosystem of environmental technology providers, both private and nonprofit. The problem is that complex and antiquated policy, cultural, and procurement barriers often prevent agencies from finding and using the best tools and ideas out there. In a recent study, we identified three chief barriers that could, if addressed, meaningfully accelerate the pace of technology projects at environmental agencies. We found that there are inefficient ways for technology providers to understand environmental agencies’ programmatic needs, high administrative costs can overwhelm the potential benefits of working with environmental agencies, and a patchwork of technology policies and practices can slow down or prevent successful projects.

To tackle those barriers we came up with seven action-oriented solutions:

Reduce the time it takes to match technology providers with agency program needs by proactively pulling in more information on technologies, analyzing it, and sharing that information across the agency or with partners, e.g., regulated entities.
Information on agency technology programs and how to engage with agency staff are fragmented. Consider consolidating this information by agency or sector to enable a technology provider to submit information once rather than “starting over” with each office, program, or agency.
Technology providers often face challenges establishing a contact who understands an agency’s needs and procurement processes. Some agencies have proven successful with robust liaison functions for interacting with companies interested in licensing technologies developed in government labs and using them in the private sector. Replicate models from other agencies that have done this well and bolster that capacity in ways that meet the agency’s particular needs.
For more transparency, agencies could issue a detailed, publicly accessible strategy document focusing on the outcomes agencies seek from technology projects for specific programs. This can signal to technology providers where there might be opportunities to innovate and help align expectations internally and externally before projects begin.
Maximizing the accessibility of information could help overcome some of the capacity and planning hurdles that technology providers face when working with federal environmental agencies. Making resources more tailored or requiring less knowledge of federal contracting could be a concrete way to encourage more technology providers to work with environmental agencies.
Technology providers have found success contributing to projects that received agency awards to raise the profile of technology projects and help overcome risk aversion in government. Institutionalizing or automating information sharing on technology projects could help successful approaches spread faster and further across agencies.
Contracts, grants, memoranda of understanding (MOUs), and other agreements are not one-size-fits-all. To ensure the most effective strategy, agencies could diversify opportunities for nonprofits by focusing more on open data where appropriate, or alternative clauses or approaches to working with agencies. Whatever the mechanism, agencies should work to structure agreements and vehicles to make formal collaboration with partners easier to navigate and leverage.