Management of the General Services Administration’s Digital Presence

1.  Purpose.

This Order establishes responsibilities regarding the creation and enforcement of guidelines and procedures that apply to all public-facing websites and General Services Administration (GSA)-operated digital services (inclusive of those whose only public page consists of a login screen), managed by GSA.

2.  Vision and Strategy for GSA’s Digital Presence.

GSA’s digital presence should set the bar for the rest of the federal government by putting the customer first and delivering a best-in-class digital experience. 

For the purposes of this order, a GSA "customer" is any person or group who accesses or needs to access the work products, services, and systems of GSA. This includes groups like agencies and suppliers and individuals like the American people and GSA employees. These groups overlap (suppliers can be agencies; GSA employees are American people); for this reason, customer understanding begins first with understanding the context with which a customer approaches GSA.

To put this broad and diverse group of customers "first" the agency must:

1. Provide guidance and resources including staffing, training, and funding as needed for managing and delivering information and services to customers,
2. Encourage a GSA digital presence that promotes the agency's priorities and reflects GSA's overarching values and culture,
3. Provide up-to-date information and services to facilitate digital transactions that meet customer needs,
4. Improve customer satisfaction and task completion rates by employing best practices to simplify those transactions,
5. Appropriately fund agency-wide and program-level customer experience (CX) and Enterprise Digital Experience (EDX) efforts throughout the digital lifecycle,
6. Work across organizational boundaries to leverage operational, contextual, and experiential data to evaluate, maintain, and improve the customer experience.
7. Ensure components that impact the user experience, including both policies that impact digital services, and related backend processes, are designed to meet customer needs, and validated through user research.
8. Continuously improve all GSA digital services in recognition that digital tools are always evolving.