CMS overhaul only the beginning

Digital transformation may have become a cause celebre for federal government agencies this year, but two years down its own transformation journey, one NSW state department has learned firsthand how hard it is — both in its own right, and within the context of inescapable confounding factors unique to governments.

The transformation journey within the economic growth-focused NSW Department of Trade and Investment (DTI) began some time ago as the agency began considering how it could better service the needs of citizens and businesses across the state.

This broad objective might sound familiar to any government IT manager — but as strategic communications manager Janelle Neath told GTR, as early investigations into the department’s current state kicked off, it quickly became clear how much work there was to be done.

With over 148 different websites, 30 intranets and “an infinite number” of social media channels, Neath said it was clear that the department’s previous way of communicating with citizens “brought in a whole other level of complexity”.

That complexity, she said, is a common problem within government — where regular elections cause “incredibly destructive” changes as government functions are moved between portfolios and “there is this expectation of business units and functions to continue operating as though nothing had happened”.

From an IT perspective, she continued, “one of the default mechanisms is to hold onto those systems, processes and platforms so that you are a lot more mobile. But when you actually look at this from a customer experience perspective, it is so incredibly challenging that we’re never going to see the best possible outcomes moving forward.”

Fighting the chance that organisational inertia could compromise the agency’s efforts to improve its customer interactions, the DTI project team continued working to develop a service and interaction roadmap for its reinvention — by first working alongside consultancy and implementation partner Squiz to conduct extensive, focused customer research.

This research helped the DTI team draw out some of the ways in which customers were being let down by the former fragmented systems. “Given the diverse portfolio of responsibilities, it seemed a pretty significant task,” Neath said, “but our main focus was on how we could find commonalities across the business.”

Conducting customer research was “probably the most powerful stage in the whole process,” she continued, “because it allowed us to highlight that a single business or individual may interact with a large number of areas in the business just to operate. We needed to commit to putting the customer at the centre of the solution, and we were then able to establish a roadmap for the consolidation.”

With clear goals in mind and a roadmap to follow, the team was able to develop a consistent website, based on Squiz’s CMS and ancillary technologies, that went live in late 2014. By following a customer-focused design rather than simply providing a digital representation of departmental functions, the new site was both more user-friendly and more effective in providing citizens and businesses with access to the core functions they required.

Dealing with the biggest challenge

Even as the team was sorting out minor issues as they came up during the first few months of the new environment, electoral uncertainty was setting up what Neath called “our biggest challenge”.

After the resounding defeat of the incumbent government in the March state election, a major organisational shake-up saw some functions of the former Department of Trade and Investment, Regional Infrastructure and Services redistributed into the current DTI and other agencies.

This change, which took effect on 1 July, directly challenged the flexibility that DTI had built into its environment, as well as redefining the scope for the next phase of the project: the delivery of an extensive intranet that would apply the same customer-centric design principles to internal consumers of DTI services.

Pushing this internal change was hard enough before undergoing a major organisational restructuring — but in the wake of the separation mandate, the earlier roadmap proved to be invaluable in helping departmental leaders stick to plan and guide the transformation project through major changes that would affect all of its 8000 staff.

“I can’t stress enough how important leadership is in this space,” Neath said. “In a changing world, we need to be agile. Through this process, we’ve been able to demonstrate that it’s actually much more important to have a complete understanding of what the needs are — to not just market a Rolls Royce solution, but to be able to move with a minimum required product.”

By establishing a baseline for the functionality that staff required, DTI was able to consider how new usage models, such as mobile access, could be applied to the intranet to improve employee access to core services.

“Such a large proportion of people were disconnected from the organisation because they were field officers and mobile,” Neath said. “In moving from the old world, where everything was locked down and hidden behind networks and firewalls, we had to go on a pretty big journey.”

That journey heavily leveraged the collaboration networks and the common purpose that had been established during the months of groundwork and preparation that DTI had undertaken with Squiz.

“Working with our IT areas to move out from behind the firewalls, and moving into the cloud, meant that we had connected such a large proportion of our workforce,” she explained. “This allows them to communicate and collaborate and, most importantly, helps the leadership to reinforce the messaging around the type of culture and the type of public service we need to be for the future.”

With the intranet now live, and ancillary tools such as SquizRoadmap facilitating knowledge capture and staff involvement in organisational goals, Neath said that DTI’s work with Squiz — which provided both consulting support and a broad technology stack — had helped ensure that the transformation extended far beyond a superficial website redesign.

“I’m thoroughly enjoying working with government at the moment because the time is just right,” Neath said, noting that the climate of government transformation “had set up a challenge to all public servants that we need to change the way we operate”.

“We are only going to be able to deliver the best possible outcomes if we have a cohesive and committed workforce that are working towards one common goal,” she continued.

“But, for the first time, we will be united as a department behind a very, very strong corporate plan that drives divisional strategic plans — even down to the point of providing clarity to individuals about what role they play in the organisation. Every step of the way has been rooted in making sure we have a foundation of trust.”

Pictured: Janelle Neath. Photo by Derek Bogart.