Ask HN: My brother is the director of Alaska VA and asked for help for this app
As someone who often gets asked by government officials on what can be done to improve the lives of X, Y, or Z and what applications can be built and how can we use artificial intelligence in a sector, my first answer is to get X, Y, and Z to the table and in the room then we&#x27;ll talk.<p>Alost anything other than that is a hammer looking for a nail, or an app looking for no user.<p>The same used to happen to us building custom software for enterprise, where an executive starts telling us features to build for analysts&#x2F;salespeople&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;engineering, and what the product should do. We asked access to users and were denied, and got paid for software nobody uses which is demoralizing.<p>Our position now is: get the analysts&#x2F;salespeople&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;engineering in the room and we&#x27;ll build a product that drives value just fine.<p>A lot of problems exist not for lack of a mobile app, and people either fail to see the problems in terms of systems, incentives, friction, trust, etc or there&#x27;s pressure to <i>show</i> something is being done and an app is a good way to do just that. Activity over output.<p>My opinion is: although the pressure may be strong on your brother to show something is being done, a good way to actually <i>get</i> things done is to meet the people your brother is trying to serve, and then <i>serve</i> them. Doing that may expose that many of them may have trouble actually acquiring soap, or are disabled and need someone to help them through this, or just need food and shelter.