Digital Government: Transforming Public Services, Regulation, and Citizenship

Last month I attended a talk by Mr Angus Taylor MP, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation on digital transformation at Australian Parliament House, Canberra. Mr Taylor mentioned his monograph "The Promise of Digital Government: Transforming Public Services, Regulation, and Citizenship" (Menzies Research Centre, 1 April 2016). This is modest in size, at 78 pages, but ambitious in aim: to transform not only the way services are delivered, but also how we think about Government. This is from the point of view of a conservative politician, emphasizing contest-ability for the delivery of government services, with maximum private sector involvement. However, while Mr Taylor's political opponents might use different rhetoric to describe their aims, I suspect they would agree with many of the aims and methods.

 

The difficulty with digital government comes at the level of implementation: are governments, whichever their political views, willing to invest in personnel with the skills needed to implement digital government? Are they willing to accept the political cost of implementation, such as where the use of on-line service delivery results in the closure of shop-front services in marginal electorates?

 

To give one example, schools currently run on a pre-digital model. Recent initiatives, such as a reduction in class size, have increased the cost of education, without any discernible improvement in outcomes (and may have actually reduced the quality of education) An alternative would be to "flip" the education system, particularly at the upper end. Students would be provided with on-line resources and highly qualified on-line teachers, to supplement their face-to-face education. Also the student's parents would be provided with information on the children's learning. However, one implication of this would be more students per teacher (as each teacher would cost much more due to their higher qualifications). There would also be a requirement for parents to take an active part in their children's education (with parents being given tasks to compete and tracked as to performance). The political reality that parents just want school as a form of government funded child minding might then become apparent.

Seizing the full opportunities presented by the government’s digital agenda

Greetings from the Australian Computer Society in Canberra, where Lalit Guglani and Andrew Robson from Callida Consulting are speaking on "Seizing the full opportunities presented by the government’s digital agenda – why bother and how? - ACS EA SIG". They outlined the benefits from having joined up digital government (and the need for security and privacy). Also they emphasized the cultural changes which accompany technological developments tend to be forgotten.

Lalit and Andrew suggested that channels need to be combined for providing services to the citizens. However, I suggest I different approach can be used, which is a digital channel, supplemented by other means. Government can't afford to  provide more and more channels: shop-fronts, kiosks, Internet, mobile, apps and so on. Instead there could be one digital platform accessed directly by the citizen as an app and mobile friendly web site. The same channel can also be accessed through a kiosk and indirectly through staff at a shop-front.

Promise of Digital Government

Greetings from the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, where I have been taking part in a forum on digital transformation. The speaker was Mr Angus Taylor MP, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation. Mr Taylor is author of The Promise of Digital Government: Transforming Public Services, Regulation, and Citizenship (Menzies Research Centre, 1 April 2016). It was impressive to hear from a minister who is so across his portfolio that he had written on the subject. One correction to what the Minister said: the essay is available on Amazon (both in paper and Kindle formats). The forum was hosted by Inside Canberra.

IT matters of interest in the 2016/2017 Federal Budget

From 1996, when the Australian budget was first put on-line, to 2015, I produced a summary of IT related items. This year the Australian Computer Society sponsored a "Budget Insider 2016", so I have not produced my own summary. However, here are some brief comments:

The governments' Youth Jobs PaTH for pre-employment skills training sounds worthwhile. However the government needs to put in place effective measures to prevent fraud in the system, as has happened with the VET-HELP scheme (with several billion dollars lost).

What is not mentioned on education in the budget is how to manage the transformation from classroom to on-line. If Australian institutions do not make this change in the next five to ten years, the current education export industry will collapse and become an education services deficit of about $25B per year. To help prevent that I have prepared a proposal for a train-the-trainer program on Entrepreneurial Skills and Digital Technology. I plan to present this at an international computer education conference later in the year.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is unlikely to be any more successful than the NEHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) it replaces, in adoption of the e-Health records. After expenditure of more than a billion dollars there is little to show. The project should be abandoned and rethought: What is the government trying to accomplish? How best can it be done? Who has succeeded at this elsewhere?

The Digital Transformation Office (DTO) has been given some more time to prove itself. But I suggest that if it does not start producing some tangible results in the next year, it should, and will, be scrapped.

How Digital Transformation Works

This morning I attended a talk by Casey West on "How Platforms Work" at the Australian Government Digital Transformation Office (DTO) in Canberra. Casey gave a good introductory overview of the underlying technology needed to provide computer applications (although he got a little bogged down on details, such as port assignments). As someone trained in computinging the age of  mainframes, it is both reassuring and disconcerting to see the "app" age reinventing the techniques need for running large scale reliable applications.

It was interesting to see DTO's office. This is a cross between a government office and a computer startup company. The office looks like a neater version of an innovation center, with post-it notes on walls and white-boards covered in diagrams. There are also a lot of thirty-something males with beards and check shirts.

Have seen the DTO office, I am more comfortable with what they are trying to do. However, it needs to be kept in mind that government applications have to be built to a much higher standard of reliability and usability than commercial free "apps". This presents a challenge for DTO to balance the need to get products out quickly and ensure that government obligations are met.

An example of the difficulties for government applications is that they have to operate when under hacking attack, not just from amateurs, but from professional nation state sponsored cyber-warfare. Companies can invoke "force majeure" and say they could not provide a service due to circumstances beyond their control, but governments can't. This will be discussed next week at...

ps: Casey West is in Australia until 10 March.

ACT Chief Digital Officer Outlines His Vision for the Future of Canberra

Jon Cumming, the new (and first) ACT Chief Digital Officer (CDO) talked at an Australian Computer Society meeting in Canberra last night. He outlined the ACT Digital Strategy he has proposed to government:

1. Growing the digital economy
2. Delivering digital services
3. Foundations for digital services

As Jon explained, the first of these aims is outward looking, the other two about government.

What struck me was there was no mention of education and training. The ACT Government is doing good things in this area and perhaps should highlight them. The best example is the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) promoting business startups. More could be done in ACT schools implementing the national digital curriculum.


One point of confusion was exactly what was the role of a CDO. I had assumed this was just a new term for the CIO and Jon was the new head of IT for the ACT Government. But it appears this more a role like the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Office (DTO), to encourage adoption of IT. This is a difficult role as it involves advocating use of IT to improve services (and particularly the public face of services) without getting bogged down in implementation details. There is a risk that those designing digital initiatives will attempt to implement complex IT systems. There are many IT systems which sound like a really good idea, but which have not been built because either they can't be built reliably, or, on closer inspection really are not a good idea. An important part of the job of an IT professional is to say to their client: "NO: that is not a good idea".

Jon mentioned Estonia's success with digital government. However, what he did not mention was that E-Estonia was subject to cyber-attack in 2007 which has a serious effect on government operations. In response the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) was established in Estonia. Canberra is a national capital and so a prime target for cyber-war. While such attacks by nation states, or non-state groups, will be primarily directed against Australian Government agencies in Canberra, the ACT Government will also be a target. The ACT Government needs to plan to keep services operating while under sustained on-line attack for months, or years. Every digital service the ACT Government implements needs to take this risk into account.

IT matters of interest in the 2015/2016 Federal Budget

Just about every year since the Australian Federal Budget was first put on the web, I have done a quick search though the documents to find matters of interest in information technology.

IT IN THE BUDGET

The budget search service failed at 10:30pm, reporting "A software error has occurred.". So I used Google to search for "Information Technology", finding seven results (up from four in 2014/2015):

Budget 2015 - Protecting Australia

"The new measures include $296 million to strengthen the capabilities of our intelligence agencies, including updating information technology systems. ...
New legislation requires telecommunication companies to retain metadata for two years. We are providing $131 million to assist the telecommunications industry to upgrade its systems to implement this policy." (Repeated in PDF version of "Protecting Australia - Budget").

Metadata ...Budget 2015 - Overview - Fairness of benefits

"We will invest an initial $60 million to kick start the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation to upgrade the Department of Human Services’ (DHS) information technology to meet the demands of today’s digital world." (repeated in PDF version of "Overview - Budget").

Defence Housing Australia — reform

"The Government will provide $4.0 million over two years from 2015‑16 to undertake a reform of Defence Housing Australia (DHA). This will include a review of DHA's accounting, information technology and business reporting systems to improve transparency of the cost of providing DHA's services, as well as a review of DHA's business plans to support the sustainable delivery of quality and accessible housing and accommodation services. "

Part 3: Capital Measures
Table 3: Capital measures since the 2014-15 MYEFO

Information technology security enhancements for Parliamentarians $6.0M

Information technology security enhancements for Parliamentarians

"The Government will provide $12.9 million over four years from 2015-16 to the Department of Finance to install more secure networking equipment and to provide additional capability for secure wireless infrastructure in electorate offices and Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices connecting to the Parliamentary Computing Network. The replacement of obsolete communications equipment will result in improved information technology security for electorate offices and parliamentary
systems in Parliament House. "

Part 2: Staffing of Agencies - Budget

"Some of the overall reductions in staffing levels will be offset by temporary increases in particular areas to manage implementation of policy change or to build infrastructure required to achieve future automation and efficiencies. This includes investment in the information technology systems of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the first tranche of the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation Programme."

SOME IT HIGHLIGHTS

The "National Broadband Network" (NBN) recieves limited attention for such a large project, with only two mentions, down from four last year and eleven the year before. Curiously I could not find a dollar figure for the NBN, instead "Your Government online":

"The Government is delivering the National Broadband Network faster and at less cost, to enable all Australians to connect to transformative services online. ...

That is why the Government is investing $254.7 million in the Digital Transformation Agenda to transform government service delivery.

This includes the establishment of a Digital Transformation Office to drive the Agenda and ensure that Government services are simpler and easier to use and can be completed from start to finish online.
The first phase of the Agenda will include provisions to:

• implement a Digital Service Standard to apply to all Government agencies to make services simpler, faster and easier to use;
• design and deliver more myGov services with an improved digital inbox, ‘tell us once’ services, and a new digital account for businesses that can be accessed using myGov; and
• a simpler, more consistent and efficient grants administration process across government.

The Agenda will also include the implementation of a Streamlined Business Registration service announced in the Jobs and Small Business package. This will simplify the process of registering a business."

The provision for the "Stage One and establishment of the Digital Transformation Office" is a relatively modest $0.3M.

Pia Waugh, from the Digital Transformation Office  will be speaking at  Open Knowledge Australia's "Open Data and Digital Services: Foundations for a New Information Economy" in Canberra, 2:30pm, 13 May 2015.

In 2013/2014 the Government "recommitted" to "Remote Indigenous Internet Access", but but without an explicit amount of money committed to the program. Last year there were no such programs in the budget.This year there is provision for: " remote Indigenous internet training"  $2.2M.

In 2013/2015 the Government announced it would save $31.2 M over two years by incorporating the functions of the National Health Information Network (NHIN) into the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system. Last year $140.6 million was provided in for the PCEHR. The government  has now renamed the project "My Health Record":

"The Government will invest $485 million to improve the electronic health record system for all Australians."

 This project has already cost many hundreds of millions of dollars for little result. I suggest it requires investigation by the Auditor-General, if not the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP).


QUALITY OF THE WEB PAGE

This year budget web site worked well (except the search function). Each year from 1996 to 2006 the budget web site was improved. By 2007-08 it reached a stable design, also used for to 2011/2013, using HTML 4.01 Transitional. The 2014/15 had s similar design using HTML5.  The 2015/2016 website has changed to a more mobile friendly design. The home page scored 91/100 on Google's Mobile PageSpeed Insights for User Experience. The page received a 62 / 100 for Speed, which is not as good as it could be, given the heavy traffic it is likely to experience.

The home page failed a W3C HTML Markup Validation test, with fifteen errors. These are not serious problems and easily fixed, but it is curious that such a high profile page is not tested more thoroughly.

The home page scored a very poor 0 out of 100 on the W3C mobileOK Checker. The total size of the page is  527.2KB (document: 14.6KB - stylesheets: 81.4KB - images: 431.1KB). This much smaller than  2014/2015 when the page ballooned to 17.9MB, but the style-sheets and images could be trimmed.

The budget home page failed a aChecker automated accessibility test (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) but with just two very minor and easily corrected problems.

The Budget is released under a a Creative Commons BY Attribution 3.0 Australia license, in line with open access government policy (commenced 2012/13).

Comments on past budgets:

1996 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9608/0096.html
1997 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9705/0315.html
1998 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9805/0174.html
1999 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9905/0265.html
2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0005/0358.html
2002 https://web.archive.org/web/20080521192851/http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0205/0318.html
2004 http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2004-May/056673.html
2005 http://www.archivum.info/link@mailman.anu.edu.au/2005-05/msg00035.html
2006 http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2006-May/066486.html
2007 http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20072008.html
2008 http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20072008.html
2009 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2009/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20092010.html
2010 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20102011.html
2011 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20112012.html
2012 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20122013.html
2013 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2013/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20132014.html
2014 http://blog.tomw.net.au/2014/05/it-matters-of-interest-in-20142015.html
2014 Changes to Australian Higher Education in the 2014/2015 Federal Budget

Digital Government in Canberra

Greetings from the Australian Computer Society Canberra Branch where Miguel Carrasco is speaking on "Accelerating the digital government transformation".

The Prime Minister and Minister for Communications announced the "Australian Government Digital Transformation Office" (DTO) on 23 January 2015:

 "... so that government services can be delivered digitally from start to finish and better serve the needs of citizens and businesses ... The DTO will operate more like a start-up than a traditional government agency, focussing on end-user needs in developing digital services.".

Miguel Carrasco commented that the Australian Communications Minister is "enamored" with the UK Government approach to digital services. This, I suggest is not new, with the former Australian Government Chief Information Officer (AGCIO), Ann Steward, having spent some time as Director e-Government in the UK Cabinet Office. The DTO has issued a draft Digital Service Standard, based on the UK Government standard.

Miguel described the setting up a DTO as acting as a "beacon for talent", but said they did not have more than six months to produce results. He claimed that the start-up talent needed was not in Canberra. But he did not acknowledge the work of the ACT Government funded Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) which is fostering startups in Canberra. I just came from CBRIN, where former Senator, Kate Lundy, chair of the startup company Welcomer, has  launched of a new product which could be used by government agencies, as well as corporations.

In my view, new and existing professionals can be trained to undertake start-up functions. The ANU is doing this with their TechLauncher program (I have a team of students working on an education product).

Also the ACS runs a 12 week on-line course "New Technology Alignment" on how to identify such transformations in organizations (I am tutoring the course and the students are up to week 8 at present).

One aspect of DTO is the question of how it will work with the shared service functions in government.

ps: At the moment I am designing an innovation course specially tailored for Canberra and will be discussing it in "Innovations in teaching innovation" at CSIRO ICT Centre on the ANU campus, 4pm, 27 April 2015.

Australian Government Digital Transformation

Miguel Carrasco from Boston Consulting Group will speak on "Accelerating the digital government transformation", at the Australian Computer Society in Canberra, 4:45pm, 14 April 2015.

The Prime Minister and Minister for Communications announced the "Australian Government Digital Transformation Office" (DTO) on 23 January 2015 "... so that government services can be delivered digitally from start to finish and better serve the needs of citizens and businesses ... The DTO will operate more like a start-up than a traditional government agency, focussing on end-user needs in developing digital services.". The ACS Virtual College runs a 12 week on-line course "New Technology Alignment" in how to identify such transformations. I am tutoring the course and the students are up to week 7 at present. Also I am designing an innovation coruse specially tailored for Canberra and will be discussing it in "Innovations in teaching innovation" at CSIRO ICT Centre on the ANU campus, 4pm, 27 April 2015.

ACS Enterprise Architecture Special Interest Group (SIG): Accelerating the digital government transformation 

The Australian Government recently announced the establishment of a Digital Transformation Office (DTO) to advance the national e-Government agenda. The Prime Minister and Communications Minister have stated that the DTO will operate "more like a start-up", bringing together developers, researchers and designers to put customer needs and user experience front and centre. The idea of government being as well designed and easy to use as AirBnB or goCatch sounds attractive, but just how feasible is it to create a digital startup inside government, and what can we learn from other Governments, like the UK, U.S. and Denmark, that have taken similar approaches?

In this presentation, members will learn about the approaches taken by global leaders in e-Government highlights some best practice principles for establishing a ‘digital office’ including the importance of whole of government enterprise architectures and standards. Miguel will cover why Australia is in a prime position to learn from and adapt best practice from these countries and accelerate digital transformation of the government, and the Australian economy.