Community

One of the most memorable lessons Marcy Jacobs absorbed about designing government services did not come from a statehouse or federal office. It came from the command posts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

In the early 2000s, Jacobs worked alongside federal agents and local law enforcement officers in high-pressure command centers. Information had to land on the first pass, or it turned into dead weight. Nobody had time to reread or click links twice. People were making decisions under duress, sometimes with lives hanging in the balance. 

Design that slowed them down failed them.

“Understanding the context [that] people receiving the information are living in matters,” Jacobs said. “We are designing for people at different moments of criticality, urgency, and emotion.”

When Jacobs described this period of her life, she smiled, recognizing a throughline in her career rather than a chapter left behind. She described the experience as “visceral” that revealed who she was building for and with.

“They don’t want to sit in a command post,” she said. “They want to be out on the street running down leads. How do we meet them where they are?”

Two decades later, Jacobs still designs for those moments. Only now, the people are millions of Maryland residents navigating public benefits and essential services — often between work shifts, child care pickups, and everything else life demands.

As deputy secretary and the state’s first chief digital experience officer, leading the Maryland Digital Service, Jacobs knows she cannot do this work alone. The problems are complex and interconnected: how to hire and retain digital talent, where to invest limited resources, and how to structure teams and design services that work under real-world constraints.

Jacobs is part of the Beeck Center’s Digital Government Network (DGN), a national network that brings together 8,000 public servants and civic technology partners grappling with the same challenges. The network unifies the Beeck Center’s Digital Benefits Network (DBN), Digital Service Network (DSN), and State Chief Data Officers Network (CDO), which merged in early 2026.

For Jacobs, knowing what has worked elsewhere and where peers are experimenting helps her make better decisions. 

“Having people you can talk to, who are working on the same problems, matters,” Jacobs said. “It’s much harder to do this work on your own.”

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The DGN engages practitioners through communities of practice and applied research. Across its topic- and role-based communities, 763 members — including nearly 500 state and local government practitioners — compare approaches, pressure-test ideas, and learn from one another’s successes and missteps. 

Events like FormFest, a free virtual gathering focused on governments improving online forms and service access, have drawn more than 2,000 global participants annually since 2023. The network’s Digital Government Hub extends that work beyond convenings. The searchable platform now serves more than 167,000 users annually with curated guidance, playbooks, and examples from across the field, including national research, such as “Hiring, Retaining, and Upskilling Digital Service Talent in Government” and “The 2025 State Chief Data Officer Survey.”

When Jacobs stepped into her role in the Old Line State, there was no blueprint waiting for her.

She inherited a small team of eight people responsible for building websites, provisioning Microsoft SharePoint sites, and overseeing major IT development projects. The mandate was broad.

So, she started the way she often does: by listening. She met with agency leaders to pinpoint what worked and what did not. She sat with her staff, asking what energized them and where they felt stuck. In the first two years, the team expanded to more than 55 people. But those early conversations set the tone for how the work moved forward.

That instinct to listen carried into another space.

Jacobs remembered joining her first Chief Digital Service Officer (CDSO) Community of Practice Zoom call and feeling “like the new kid,” she said. A dozen or so leaders were already on the line. Many knew one another. 

She jumped in and asked peers: “What do you wish you had known when you started?” “What should leaders tackle first?” “What takes longer than you expect?”

“Having 30-plus like-minded people who are working on the same problems in different spaces gives a level of support that I didn’t have in the federal [government],” Jacobs said. “It felt very much like little pockets, because our organizations were all so different.”

It quickly became clear that Maryland’s challenges were common across state lines.

Her years of working in federal service, including in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the former U.S. Digital Service, taught Jacobs that no two agencies operate the same way. Many teams worked in silos. Missions and structures varied so widely that shared solutions rarely traveled across agencies.

However, at the state level, because many states deliver the same core services, she saw far more overlap. 

One example is permitting and licensing.

“Permitting is not unique to Maryland,” Jacobs said. “Everybody has that problem.” And it is not one thing. “It’s recreational, occupational, business, environmental, [and] construction.”

States across the country are grappling with outdated permitting processes delaying critical infrastructure projects, raising costs, and creating uncertainty for families and businesses, according to a report from the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. Slow and complex approval processes can stall projects across energy, transportation, and broadband, affecting how — and how quickly — essential services reach people. New transmission lines, for example, can take an average of 10 years to complete, The New York Times reported — longer than it took to build the Panama Canal and twice as long as the Hoover Dam. Fixing these delays requires coordination across agencies and states — work that is difficult to do alone.

When Maryland began exploring digital accessibility tools, Jacobs reached out to peers after a DGN meeting. Two states were already using a tool Maryland was considering and having good experiences. Maryland was still deciding how much scope to put into a contract.

That kind of peer exchange is becoming more urgent as states prepare for the April 2026 Department of Justice deadline requiring state and local governments to make web content and mobile applications accessible under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. DGN members are looking for practical ways to prepare. A11yJam (Accessibility Jam) grew out of that demand, bringing government teams together to share practical approaches for making digital services accessible.

“The network and the collaboration have been the most valuable piece of this,” she said. “It’s helpful to hear from others to really understand the ground truth, not just what we get from a market research conversation — because somebody has thought about it,” Jacobs added.

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Beeck Center researchers mapped that collective experience through rigorous landscape analyses, including “The State of State Digital Transformation,” which examines how states are organizing digital service teams, chief data officer roles, design systems, and related policies across all 50 states and U.S. territories.

Impressed by how practical the map was, Jacobs took in the landscape of who was doing what, and Maryland’s role within it. Patterns surfaced: States with chief data officers, for example, are 3.4 times more likely to have digital service teams.

“I thought the map was really cool,” she said. “I like being able to click on a topic and see what lights up. It helps you understand who’s doing what across the country.” Jacobs is already envisioning what would come next.

She pointed to the Beeck Center as the connective force behind it.

“Beeck is kind of magic,” she said. “They do the groundwork to pull us all together.”