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Hi everybody.
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My name is Matt Cutts, and I worked at Google for almost 17 years.
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As a distinguished engineer there,
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I was pretty close to the top of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
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Then I decided to follow some inspiring folks and do a short tour at the US Digital Service.
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That's the group of geeks that helped rescue HealthCare.gov when that website went down hard in 2013.
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Yeah.
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So I signed up for a three-to-six-month tour, and almost three years later,
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I'm still in Washington DC, working for the federal government, because the government really needs technologists right now.
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At my old job, every room had videoconferencing integrated with calendars, power cables were built right into the furniture.
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When I moved to a government agency,
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I had to call a person to set up a phone conference.
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And when we moved to a new office, we didn't have furniture for a while, so we set up the phone on a trash can.
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One of the things that surprised me, whenever I moved to DC, is how much the government still has to deal with paper.
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This is a facility in Winston-Salem,
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North Carolina, where people were worried that the building might be structurally unsound from the weight of all that paper.
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Yeah.
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Paper has some downsides.
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Here's a pop quiz:
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If your last name starts with H or higher,
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H or higher, would you raise your hand?
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Wow.
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I have some bad news:
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Your veteran records might have been destroyed in a fire in 1973.
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Yeah.
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Paper processes are also slower and more prone to errors.
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If you're a veteran and you're applying for your health benefits using a paper form, you might have to wait months for that form to be processed.
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We replaced that with a web form, and now most veterans find out if they can get access to their health benefits in 10 minutes.
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Here's another launch that I'm proud of.
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We worked with the Small Business Administration to move one of their systems from paper to digital.
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So this is a picture from before, and this is afterwards.
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Same cubicles, same people, just a better system for everyone.
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At one point, we wanted to celebrate modernizing a different system, and so we went to a local grocery store
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and we said, "Can you make a cake and decorate it with the form that we've digitized?"
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And the grocery store got really weirded out by that request.
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They wanted a letter on official government letterhead.
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Well, we work for the government, so we wrote a letter that said,
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"You can use this public-domain form on a cake for celebratory purposes."
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Which led to bad jokes about filling forms out in triplicake.
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Yes, dad jokes in government.
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Now I've talked a lot about paper, but we also bring up computer systems that go down.
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We bring in modern technology practices, like user-centered design and the cloud, and we also help improve procurement.
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It turns out government buys software the same way that it buys chairs and brownies and tanks: from government regulations that are over 1,000 pages long.
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So yes, there's some stuff that's messed up in government right now.
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But if you think Silicon Valley is the savior in this story, you've got another thing coming.
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Some of the best and brightest minds in technology are working on meal-delivery start-ups and scooters
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and how to deliver weed to people better.
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Is that really the most important thing to work on right now?
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Silicon Valley likes to talk about making the world a better place.
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But you feel your impact in a much more visceral way in government.
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This is somebody whose dad passed away.
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He hunted me down on Twitter to say that a system that we had improved worked well for him during a tough time.
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Those tough times are when government needs to work well and why we need innovation in government.
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Now I have a confession to make.
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When I came to DC,
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I sometimes used words like bureaucrat.
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These days,
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I'm much more likely to use words like civil servant.
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Like Francine, who can make you cry.
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Or at least, she made me cry, because she's so inspiring.
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I am also deeply, fiercely proud of my colleagues.
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They will work through illogical situations and put in late nights to get to the right result.
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The government can't pay huge salary bonuses, so we ended up making our own awards.
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Our mascot is a crab named Molly.
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And so that award is actually a crab-shaped purse, screwed into sheet metal.
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These days, I believe less in silver bullets that are going to fix everything.
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I believe more in the people who show up to help.
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If you're looking for something deeply meaningful and full disclosure, sometimes incredibly frustrating here's what you need to know.
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There is something difficult and messy and vital and magical happening when civil servants partner with technologists at the city and state and national level.
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You don't have to do it forever.
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But you can make a difference in public service right now.
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Thank you.
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