On Monday, the Obama administration officially inaugurated the U.S. Digital Service, a sort of tech consulting firm housed in the White House Office of Management and Budget. The first administrator of USDS is Mikey Dickersons, an engineer and former Google site reliability manager who was a pivotal player in salvaging Healthcare.gov after its calamitous launch last October. As part of the government, Dickerson and his team will try to prevent or fix other flailing government websites and digital services.
The USDS geek squad won't design and build websites — that's the purview of individual departments, with help from the new 18F unit of the General Services Administration — but rather drop in and troubleshoot existing problems and, in the longer term, help government agencies prevent glitches and make all federal online services more customer-friendly. His team will be "trying to get in front of these things more in the future," Dickerson said, "to make the strike team less necessary in the future."
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