Robin Carnahan, head of the General Services Administration (GSA), said she wants to focus more on how GSA can improve the delivery of services to agencies and industry partners and intends to do that by gathering data to better inform decisions, Federal News Network reported Monday.
“I’m very interested in feedback from both customers and our, our industry partners, we’ve got to have both sides of those customers,” Carnahan told FNN in an interview.
“I tend to be very data-driven, and results and impact-driven. You can only get that if you have both sides of that equation that are at the table and trying to figure out how to get the best results,” she added.
Carnahan said her four-year experience as head of the state and local consulting practice at GSA’s 18F organization enabled her to learn about the importance of procurement and technology in government service delivery.
“What I was able to do at 18F was to dig deeper into those issues on somebody wants to government to work well. It turns out technology and procurement have to get fixed if you’re going to have government work well. That time at 18F helped me understand the scale of the problem,” she noted.
At 18F, Carnahan said she collaborated with trained technologists to identify approaches to improving the delivery of government services to the public and helped non-technical government officials how to implement their policy priorities through technology.
“Those are really, really valuable lessons that I am using every day in this job as administrator,” she said. “So that’s why the implementation role that GSA plays and supporting our agency partners and implementing through technology or anything else is so important."
