Peter Wilson
This Rising Star has been working on a framework to smoothly connect people with agencies and services as they age and their needs change.
Peter Wilson combines technical knowledge with an abiding interest in management and process improvement. So although he has helped shape the development of competency standards for enterprise architecture and supported a range of agencies as a technical director at ICF International, lately he's been thinking about better managing "life events."
As chairman of ACT-IAC's Planning and Architecture Shared Interest Group, Wilson has been working on a framework to smoothly connect people with agencies and services as they age and their needs change. Organizing around people's needs rather than agencies' organizational charts is "painfully obvious," Wilson said, "but when you use it, it can lead to innovative breakthroughs."
And those breakthroughs could transform citizen services. Certain events in a person's life or a company's life cycle drive government activity. They could be as routine as a loan application or as urgent as a home destroyed by a cataclysmic weather event.
"We hope to encourage agencies to subscribe to a taxonomy of life events so they can identify a fabric of interactions, common missions, common ground where they can collaborate and identify shared services, and also really begin to figure out the customer journey," Wilson said. "It spans agencies and levels of government. We think life events [are] a very accessible and powerful way to think about the problem."
Wilson assists agencies with the nitty-gritty of enterprise architecture, identity management, integration issues and software development. And he helps agencies understand the relationship between having a plan and having a strategy.
"The things I do stem mostly around...helping people execute the basics better so everything else works better," he said.
He sees his job as making sure government agencies don't discard proven solutions in a rush to adopt something new. "Some of the work...that has been developed over decades is really good at its core," he said. "They scale well. The missions are working. Some of my job is really to help agencies understand the potential of what they have so they don't have to always reinvent whole hog."