Can Australia's bold digital government goals be met?

Australia has set a goal to become one of the top three digital governments in the world by 2025, an ambitious vision that will require a coordinated effort across public sector services.

For years, governments have been discussing the oncoming ‘wave’ of digital transformation — how to automate administrative processes and move traditionally non-digital information, such as health care, tax records, vehicle registrations, birth certificates and much more, online.

The ultimate ambition of digitising these services and operations is to make it more efficient for public servants to access and manage necessary documents and information, and in turn, make it easier for citizens to securely and easily access vital government services.

The COVID-19 pandemic helped accelerate the pace of digital transformation efforts as public bodies were forced to move services online to accommodate remote administration needs. But with just 47% of Australia’s federal services digitised so far, there is still a long way to go.

Following in the footsteps of the UK’s Digital Transformation Strategy, the Australian Government has developed its own Data and Digital Government Strategy, set to be released in full at the end of 2023. The strategy will outline the government’s vision to deliver simple, secure and connected public services for all people and business through world-class data and digital capabilities. It takes over from Australia’s Digital Continuity 2020 Policy, a strategy released in October 2015 which set in motion a whole-of-government approach to modern digital information governance.

Some areas of the Australian Government are already seeing dividends from this new roadmap to digitisation.

For example, last year Service NSW made digital vehicle registration certificates and push-notifications for renewal reminders available to motorists via their Service NSW online accounts. Digitising the process end to end allows Service NSW to address the 16% of registrations that are not renewed on time for various reasons — including damaged, misplaced or forgotten paperwork — while reducing the 7.2 million paper renewal notices sent by Transport for NSW each year.

The digitalisation of these records not only allows government to optimise their resources, but also be more agile in their information management. By not having to deal with fragmented archives of both hard-copy and digital records, public sector offices are better equipped to deal with large volumes of documentation and achieve turnover in tight timeframes.

Adopting a digital-first strategy means workers can identify, track and respond to requests with the correct documentation at speed, while saving digital copies and protecting against future damage to records. Fewer repetitive tasks also paves the way for higher levels of job satisfaction productivity benefits.

Australian citizens are likely to embrace these changes too, enjoying the personalisation and timesaving benefits that digitalisation brings to administrative tasks.

According to data from the Publicis Sapient Digital Citizen Report 2023, Australians are confident in using technology to engage with digital citizen service. 94% have used at least one digital government service, most notably MyGov (56%), health care (55%) and financial services/taxes (45%). 95% of users who participated in the pilot trial for the digital vehicle registration system for Service NSW in 2022 were happy with the digital process.

The core of digital transformation

If the benefits of digital transformation are clear, then why is just over half of the Australian public sector still dealing with a patchwork of traditional and digital archives?

To achieve digital transformation is to tackle the digitisation of sensitive and confidential document collections, in many cases in a variety of different formats, usually for long-term preservation. To do this, technology providers need to understand the pain points of the public sector and work with them to understand workflow issues and regulatory compliance requirements and overcome inertia.

Data protection laws, such as the federal Privacy Act 1988, which includes the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), establish strict requirements and processes to safeguard the confidentiality of documents and personal data. These regulations must be taken into consideration throughout any digitisation program.

Many industries encounter the same challenges faced by public administrations — they have to digitise a mixture of traditional, physical and digital archives.

It is therefore essential to analyse how the documents within these archives are organised and managed, as well as the frequency with which they are consulted to determine the digitisation workflow to use and best document management platform to use.

In some cases, it is necessary to develop new software to work with legacy systems. Administrations must also consider how they want to digitise. Looking at outsourcing services, undertaking a complete transformation of systems and processes or staggered digitisation of records are all viable paths dependent on need.

Digitisation in action: best practices and key steps

To digitise documents in a secure, compliant manner that optimises their usability, it is essential to start from the ground up, classifying documents by type, security and confidentiality level, as well as by frequency of use and safeguarding times.

At this essential first step — on which the rest of the digitisation workflow is based — it is essential to carry out a cleaning process. Documents that are no longer valid, or that must legally be destroyed after a certain period, should be identified and destroyed or removed from digital systems. This destruction process also makes it possible to optimise space and reduce costs for digitisation projects.

Once the identification phase is complete it is necessary to begin the actual digitisation. For hard-copy records this will include scanning, but existing digital documents may also need to be made searchable or use AI and machine learning to identify and extract data which can then be transferred to a database.

Digitisation can be carried out by Australian government agencies either on their own premises or externally at a secure, third-party site. Some third parties also offer on-site scanning at customer premises, and due to the large amount of sensitive documents government and public bodies have in their custody, many prefer this approach, as it saves time and ensures a secure chain of transfer end to end.

After the digitisation phase, digitised documents are stored in an appropriate system. This step should be adapted to the needs of the organisation, so that it can be done either on its own platform or on a third-party platform. A system suited for ongoing information management or archiving will give civil servants the ability to automatically apply document retention rules for data privacy compliance.

The final phase, automation, involves creating automatic process flows, often between different sets of data, for maximum efficiency. This enables employees to access information more quickly and easily, improving response times and agility in customer service.

Transforming public sector thought

Resistance to change is a common element in all public administration and has been a serious barrier to digitisation and digital transformation efforts. However, ‘change fatigue’ is also increasingly common.

This challenge can be addressed by highlighting the benefits of adopting new technologies, demonstrating the benefits of implementing this type of initiative and keeping programs as simple and goal focused as possible. Additionally, allowing civil servants to use flexible systems so that they can optimise their own workflows means they can see for themselves what digital transformation can do.

The end goal of digital transformation in the Australian public sector is to remove the obstacles that limit access to government services, speed up processes while maintaining or improving accuracy and improve the experience of citizens. Through the digitisation of legacy documents from health services, tax offices and social security departments, governments can guarantee the security and confidentiality of the records that shape the lives of their citizens and empower civil servants to optimise services.

The rise of the digital native calls for the creation of a digital world that works for all, and it is the role of technology providers to work closely with governments to make this a reality.

Image credit: iStock.com/da-kuk