The General Services Administration (GSA), 18F’s parent office, has been providing essential services to other federal agencies for more than 60 years. Last week, GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth announced the creation of the Technology Transformation Service — a third pillar of services for federal agencies alongside the Public Buildings Service and Federal Acquisition Service.

18F, along with the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OSCIT) and the Presidential Innovation Fellows, will now be organized under this new service. We’re thrilled that the work 18F and others have done in helping the government adopt and develop innovative and modern technologies and practices is being institutionalized into the core mission of GSA.

A large group picture of the more than 170 18F team members The 18F staff at our May meeting.

This new service is an investment by GSA in the long-term work of transforming how the government builds, buys, and shares digital services. It’s an acknowledgement that this is an urgent need across the government, and that GSA is the natural place to support the skills and programs needed to help government transform the way it delivers digital services to the public.

It’s exciting to see the values we hold dear spreading throughout government. In her announcement blog post, Administrator Roth said, “By moving these programs into a new service, we are demonstrating a commitment to make agile, user-centered delivery of technology the way we do business moving forward.”

This wider adoption of agile, working in the open, and a relentless focus on the end user is a validation of our work to promote culture change and help government agencies embark on their transformation journey.

This important step for GSA will help 18F continue to deliver the products and services our federal agency partners have come to expect from us over the last two years. We’ll still be helping other federal agencies build and buy digital services to better serve their users, and we’ll still be using human-centered design, agile methodologies, and open source software to get the job done.

We’ll be talking more about this new service in the coming weeks, but for now you can get more details from GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth’s post on the GSA blog.