Fed 100 Winner: Eric Markow, Director, Web Applications PMO, Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
Dedicated to the 100 women and men who personify what’s possible in how the federal government acquires, develops and manages IT, FCW’s Fed 100 is the most prestigious important award in the federal IT arena.
Often representing a mix of outstanding individuals from civilian and defense agencies, the intelligence community, the legislative branch and the private sectors, this year’s Fed 100 pointed to successes in citizen engagement and customer experience (CX).
For example, Eric Markow, Director, Web Applications PMO, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) made this year’s Fed 100 list. As a member of the IRS Tax Withholding Estimator Team, Markow played a key role in reimagining the Tax Withholding Estimator with the taxpayers fully in mind.
According to this Service to Citizen award, the team leveraged a customer-centric effort to refresh the tool to further enable citizens to accurately estimate their tax withholdings.
The IRS Tax Withholding Estimator Team was comprised of stakeholders from four distinct IRS divisions, who conducted user research interviews, benchmarked the IRS’ existing tool against similar industry offerings, and conducted heuristic evaluations. The results were distilled into design recommendations in just a few short weeks.
From there, the team used an Agile development approach to build, test, and launch an entirely new application, designed from the ground-up to address the customer experience within four months. Officially launched in 2019, the Tax Withholding Estimator tool serves upwards of 5 million customers annually.
Congratulations to Markow for being named a 2021 Fed 100! This award recognizes how the IRS is using cutting-edge Agile development to help enhance the overall taxpayer experience – a key priority for the agency.
Markow and the rest of the Fed 100 winners will be honored on August 27th at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C.
To learn more about Makpar’s new Agile Center of Excellence, please click here. In addition, Seema Khan, CEO of Makpar, recently authored this Government Computer News (GCN) guest article about why the CX journey matters for government.