Mission Effectiveness, USAF/USSF IT
Problem
User Experience and performance of IT in the Air Force had a
reputation for being slow, unreliable and cumbersome. Airmen
complained that it slowed their productivity, impaired their part of the
mission.
Solution
Colt Whittall was hired as the DOD’s first Chief Experience Officer in Jun 2019 to address this. He developed a strategy to measure UX and Performance on three new user-centered platforms, including a “Voice of the Customer program, Digital Experience Monitoring and Synthetic Transaction Monitoring at the WAN boundary. Using this data he led a program to help direct investment in “Tech Refresh” where it would get the most results from an Airman perspective. Impactful actions included accelerating PC replacement by 2.5X year over year, proactive monitoring of key UX dependencies at the base boundary, improvements to configuration of endpoint security, conversion to cloud-based device management which resulted in far more consistent push of software releases and more.
Impact
From 2021 to 2023, user satisfaction improved from about 32% to about 54%, or about 2X more satisfied users than dissatisfied. Performance of one key proxy metric had improved by 25-50% on more than 4/5 of bases.