Since launching more than a year ago, 18F has made tremendous progress toward introducing new ways to deliver services to the public. As we continue to explore how to better serve our colleagues across the government, we’ve come to realize that there may be opportunities to achieve high impact in targeted areas by aligning our subject expertise (for example, finance, healthcare) with our digital expertise (for example, human-centered design, agile development) to help agencies achieve their policy goals. Being adopters of the lean startup philosophy, this means one thing: Let’s run an experiment. To test our hypothesis, we’re launching an alpha version of our first policy vertical (or niche market) within 18F Consulting: the Digital Economy Practice.

The Digital Economy Practice competencies include industry and policy, people and organization, design and product, technology and data, and acquisition and procurement.

Across the government, agencies work hard to improve economic outcomes for our country and others. Whether it’s the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s myRA, which helps people start to save for retirement, or the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Tick Size Pilot, which studies different stock price quotation methods in order to improve access to capital for small publicly-traded companies, there are countless government initiatives aimed at expanding economic opportunity.

Our consulting team has already been partnering with numerous federal agencies to help their digital projects succeed, but this new initiative will allow us to work on broad goals instead of discrete projects. As agencies map the path of digital products, services, and innovations that they need to meet their economic policy goals, we will bring our business and technical expertise to help them define and achieve success. As we work with agencies at a higher, more strategic level to see how digital services can help them at each step of the process, we hope we can greatly increase our impact on federal digital services.

Working with the Digital Economy Practice

If your agency is working on an economic policy initiative, and you’d like to engage with 18F Consulting’s Digital Economy Practice, feel free to reach out to us at inquiries18F@gsa.gov.

Join 18F Consulting

If you’re passionate about America, technology, and economic policy and are interested in joining 18F Consulting’s Digital Economy Practice, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at join18F@gsa.gov.