1. 2016 Federal Customer Service Award – NASS Nomination for Initiative Category
Citation: For extraordinary customer service and creative ingenuity in successfully developing
and deploying a new Mobile Optimized Survey Tool (MOST) to capture Computer Assisted
Personal Interview (CAPI) data and for outstanding innovation in mobile device management.
MOST Team
Through teamwork and innovation, this team is recommended for the Federal Customer Service
Award for successfully implementing the vision of a new system known as the Mobile
Optimized Survey Tool during the October 2015 – March 2016 timeframe. The NASS
Computer Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI) program supports a customer base of 3,000+
interviewers (enumerators), over 800 NASS employees and accounts for approximately 30% of
data collected from more than 300 surveys conducted on an annual basis as well as the Census of
Agriculture. MOST plays an instrumental role in helping NASS to meet our mission of
collecting timely, accurate, and useful statistics in service of United States Agriculture and is
consistent with Department goal of using technology to streamline business processes.
The Team went above and beyond to create a new solution (MOST) to meet customer demand
that data can be collected on mobile devices with or without a cellular signal in the field. The
new solution had to be intuitive and easy to use without complicated processes and procedures to
transmit data while adhering to security regulations regarding PII. This was not an easy fix to a
system already in place. The new solution required incorporation of advances in technology,
learning new techniques to develop the solution and major obstacles to seamlessly integrate
MOST with existing legacy systems so that data would flow smoothly from the data collection
vehicle (MOST) to the edit and summary systems.
An exceptional extra effort was made by the Team to fully engineer and develop a completely
new solution that incorporated the previous CAPI functionality but used new technical
advancements to mitigate cellular signal coverage while adhering to the original terms for
security requirements, no data will be stored on the hard drive of the mobile device. The
resulting solution, MOST, downloads an enumerator’s entire sample to the RAM of the mobile
device and improves the customer experience by having all questionnaires available immediately
with no lag time. This feature also reduces respondent burden by decreasing interview time
which is significant since several hundred thousands of respondents participate in NASS
surveys each year.
Once cellular or WiFi coverage becomes available, the data automatically transfers data to the
NASS database and wipes the data from the mobile device. This feature opens the door for
enumerators to collect data via a mobile device anywhere. Data is collected more efficiently and
effectively, minimizing the need for paper questionnaires while improving the quality of the data
through automated edit checks. The customer experience (both internal and external) is
improved through utilization of the latest survey methodological procedures and features the
addition of automated guides, sum fields and routing logic to answer questions pertinent to the
respondent thus reducing interview time.

2. Extensive testing with the MOST team occurred throughout development and deployment to
insure data was collected accurately and flowed seamlessly to all legacy systems in place for
editing and summarizing. The Team coordinated all testing and feedback efforts with all
stakeholders and worked around due dates and release date schedules. They worked overtime
and weekends to release MOST prior to the busiest data collection time period, June, so that
customers both internal and external would benefit from the new solution during this
critical timeframe.
The MOST team also incorporated five years of feedback from customers for new management
tools to increase efficiency for remote sample management. These new tools benefit the
enumerators as they determine their daily work routes, but also benefits external customers and
NASS stakeholders through more efficient management of the survey sample. A new mapping
feature was added that automatically maps the best route to respondents selected for the day.
This feature gives turn by turn directions to the enumerators decreasing driving time and
mileage. Enumerators can manage their personal visits more effectively and efficiently with the
best route feature.
The automated survey sample assignment page was redesigned with additional sorting
capabilities allowing the enumerators to group coordinated surveys and operations in a variety of
ways. Through the flexibility afforded by multiple sorting functions, the enumerator can custom
design their assignment sheet to effectively manage surveys with different data collection time
frames while reducing respondent burden by collecting data for multiple surveys in one visit.
Supervisors can track and reassign workloads through the summary function and insure that all
data is collected within the data collection timeframes. Supervisors have the ability to view
surveys collected by enumerators under their supervision and perform quality control checks on
the data collected. This improves the customer experience as enumerators and supervisors have
more features to manage the sample effectively and complete data collection on time.
Lastly, a new software feature was added which allows for item level comments. This feature
attaches a comment to the appropriate item code allowing the enumerator to document issues
effecting data collection more effectively. This feature provides untold benefits for NASS
statisticians as they edit the data and set estimates based on the data collected by
enumerators. Through use of the item level comment feature, data quality has increased
significantly and estimates more accurately represent the indications derived from the data.
Estimates and indications published from NASS directly impact the entire Agricultural
community and any effort to improve data quality and more accurately represent the data
provides immeasurable benefits to the US agriculture economy.
The MOST solution represents years of collaboration between the MOST team, customers
and stakeholders directly impacted by mobile data collection. Project goals for MOST were
exceeded, despite extreme pressure from time constraints, staff resource limitations, technology
modifications, and substantive changes to the program/budgets. This accomplishment required
tremendous dedication, outstanding leadership and the tenacity to make numerous changes and
deal with copious problems as the project progressed. Extra effort was given over and over by
the team to keep the project on course and aligned with cost and resource constraints. Deploying

3. MOST reflects the special creativity, innovation, and commitment of NASS to provide
outstanding customer service and support to the program’s stakeholders and customers.
During the development of MOST, the team also focused on another area of customer need.
With close to 2,700 devices deployed, manual management of the mobile devices was no longer
viable. In addition, a fluke in an IOS release had turned off required functionality for mapping
on the devices and manual security restrictions prohibited turning the feature on remotely. The
need for a mobile device management solution had become critical but current solutions offered,
including the USDA MDM solution, did not meet the requirement for remote deployment.
Through collaboration with MobileIron and AT&T, a new NASS contract was negotiated and a
new version of MobileIron was developed for NASS to pilot. However, since the new solution
was a pilot, approvals were required by OCIO and APOC. The team met with OCIO and APOC
multiple times to receive the appropriate waiver and support to put the pilot into place. Cloud
deployment was a requirement to meet customer and business needs. Down time to ship the
devices back to HQ for an Administrator to physically install MDM was not an option as data
collection for on-going surveys could not be interrupted. The pilot and cloud deployment was a
success and MobileIron was installed on all mobile devices with no direct impact on data
collection or external customers.
Part of the MobileIron solution was to install administrative dashboards in every regional office
to automate inventory management for internal customers. No other USDA organization had
automated dashboards in field offices for inventory management. The new MobileIron solution
meets USDA, APOC and FISMA security regulations and report requirements for tracking
inventory and having the ability to remotely wipe devices. The contract negotiated for NASS and
put into place offered platinum service, cloud deployment and dashboards based on hierarchy.
This contract is now the model for negotiations taking place at the USDA level which will
impact all of USDA.
The total package of MOST combined with MobileIron offers a complete solution designed to
meet program needs and improve service for internal and external customers. The team exhibited
tireless dedication, creative ingenuity and a resolute commitment to improve customer service by
providing an innovative and novel solution for mobile data collection. This outstanding
accomplishment is worthy of the Federal Customer Service Award.
MOST Team Members:
Robin Gannon
Barbara Smith
Charles Walker
Tremayne Wilson
Pam Hird
Scott Cox
Jimmy Bellelo
David Ward
Doug Boline

4. STG Contractors
Critical
Mojo Nichols
Robert Wadsworth
Kelly Dunford
Vu Tran
Ben Phan
Lesser roles
Arman Mikaili
Russ Bowers