Interview: Paul Shetler, CEO of the DTO

The CEO of the Digital Transformation Office sees the successful reinvention of government services coming from an ‘outside in’ rather than an ‘inside out’ approach.

There’s an almost tangible enthusiasm in Paul Shetler’s voice as he describes his new role as ringmaster of Australia’s digital-government revolution, with words such as ‘start-up’ and ‘agile’ peppering his description of what has become the highest-profile job in Australian government technology.

“The government is the best digital start-up in Australia,” he said. “The DTO is dealing with a lot of the same issues that any kind of new organisation is. We’re brand new inside government and also operating as a bit of an incubator within government. Playing both roles is unusual — but we’re able to work in a real multidisciplinary team, with real agile teams to deliver stuff that really matters for people.”

Only recently appointed CEO of the $95.4m Digital Transformation Office (DTO), Shetler has been on a whirlwind tour of federal agencies, getting to know stakeholders and planting the seeds of a massive transformation effort that was brought into the limelight earlier this year by then-communications minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Shetler is no stranger to reinventing government: his previous role was director of the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS), where he spent the first six months of 2015 following a year as chief digital officer at the UK Ministry of Justice. The GDS role — which included evaluating and reporting on transformation across 25 government agencies — was what saw him hand-picked by Turnbull, who signed Shetler to a 5-year contract on the back of his record of success at the Minister of Justice. Turnbull called him “the outstanding candidate following an extensive executive search and competitive recruitment process”.

American-born Shetler’s eclectic career began in the early 1990s, managing technology at the Bank of New York. That was followed by financial services roles at Microsoft and Oracle transactions payment giant SWIFT, before serving as CEO of mobile start-ups Digital Proximates and Burnt Fingers Limited.

He’s also likely one of the few Australian government executives to be able to list ‘human rights activist’ on his CV, having organised high-profile campaigns against homophobic preaching by London imams and a ‘Jon Snow Kiss-In’ protesting the ejection of two gay patrons from a Soho pub.

His CV suggests Shetler is definitely not afraid of taking on the establishment — and this may well prove to be his strongest trait as he seeks to offer both carrot and stick to overhaul Australia’s public service into a customer service-focused organisation that becomes, in Turnbull’s words, “easier to access, simpler to use and faster to transact”.

Building a customer-service mentality isn’t something that can be done overnight, and it’s far from the bottom-up exercise to which government technologists are accustomed. Fittingly, Shetler sees the reinvention coming from a redesign “from the outside in rather than the inside out”.

“Typically, agencies will be thinking about the world from their own internal point of view and their own processes,” he said. “But if we allow that to be the determining thing about how they do things for the user, we end up having a rather Balkanised, fragmented experience. It’s much better to look at it from the standpoint of the user and organise ourselves to make that happen. That’s what’s different about digital.”

Recent Gartner research reinforces the mandate for digital change, with the firm’s 2015 Digital Business Survey recording a surge in the share of medium and large organisations that say they have a digital business, from 22% last year to 32% this year.

Yet there is more to the DTO than touchy-feely customer service. A recent Deloitte Access Economics assessment of online government found that Australians undertake over 800 million transactions with government agencies every year, around 320 million of which are still completed using non-digital channels.

If that figure could be reduced to 20% over the next 10 years, the firm concluded, the change would deliver around $17.9 billion in savings to government (through productivity, efficiency and other improvements) and a further $8.7 billion in savings for consumers through time, convenience and out-of-pocket savings.

The transformation mandate

With numbers like that at play, the DTO’s mandate is nothing if not long on vision: among the 16 key tenets of the DSS are compliance with the 36 Protective Security Policy Framework (PSPF) security controls and the guidelines of the Australian Signals Directorate’s Information Security Manual (ISM), which have been largely taken as best-practice guidelines in the past.

An outside audit of government websites earlier this year found that just 4 out of 850 sites examined — those of the Passports Office, Commonwealth courts portal, Fair Work Commission and myGov — properly secured visitor communications.

Security is only one of the DSS requirements. Others include user-needs assessments; development of multidisciplinary teams that can “design, build, operate and iterate the service” using “agile, iterative, collaborative and user-centred methods”; conducting user-satisfaction benchmarks; building services with consistent look and feel that also meets the needs of users with disabilities; integration with non-digital interactions; using analytics to monitor and improve services; and more.

That’s a tall order for government agencies that have long been perceived as being immovable dinosaurs, despite pockets of often enthusiastic transformation. Shetler, however, said he has been “pleasantly surprised” by the reaction from agency heads so far.

“The DTO could be viewed just as an upstart and they could be just asking ‘why are you guys here?’,” he said. “Many could feel that we’re just making things more complicated — but the reaction we’ve gotten has been positive so far.”

A recent meet-and-greet seminar, in which Shetler outlined the DSS to agency heads, attracted nearly 200 people to a seminar in Canberra. The live webcast attracted more than 1000 online connections — many playing to conference rooms with up to 60 people each — from across the country.

“There’s a real thirst now inside the public service,” Shetler said, “and people want to talk with us and understand how to work with us. We’re very much in demand, and want to meet that demand as best we can.”

That level of demand is not entirely of Shetler’s making, however, but can be traced back to a proclamation earlier this year that all agencies would need to lodge draft DSS adoption plans with the DTO by the end of the third quarter.

That top-down order attracted attention across the public service, which is being forced by executive mandate to review its operations with an objective eye and a focus on transformation. And it can’t come too soon for Glenn Archer, a former Australian government CIO and former head of the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), who now works as public-sector research vice president with Gartner. The analyst agency has been vocal in its calls for public-sector CIOs to abandon ponderous legacy environments and shift to a digital-first mindset.

“The establishment of the DTO is significantly overdue,” Archer explains. “There has been a demonstrable failure for us as a country to be more aggressive in terms of our adoption of digital for use by government.”

“Policy is fundamentally constraining the opportunity for us to progress digital services,” he added. “These have often been an afterthought or guided by policies that predate online in some way, and you often find yourself having to shoehorn an existing program into an online service delivery model for which it was never really considered.”

Despite the limitations imposed by an “almost single-minded focus on financial savings”, Archer believes the government’s early digitisation efforts pointed it in the right direction — but admits that “we could have done even better. And I think the DTO provides a context for us as a nation to stretch ourselves here.”

Architecting the new government

Early signs suggest the DTO’s broad mandate will push agencies in significant new directions. The August launch of a draft API design guide, for example, outlined the ways in which agencies will be expected to make their services available for online access. This API-driven architecture plays to Shetler’s own strengths as a developer and technologist, and it will play a critical role in opening up the evolving digital services for outside consumption.

So too will the massive and evolving effort to implement a coherent identity-management framework that Australians can use to access digital services. The government’s myGov service — the latest in a line of efforts to normalise the process of secure digital authentication amongst a digitally sceptical populace — will be increasingly leveraged to streamline citizen interactions with the reinvented agencies.

The push for secure online interactions will also benefit from a $33.3m Budget allocation designed to create a “trusted digital identity framework”; an $11.5m boost to the existing Tell Us Once service, which for years has worked to reduce the need for customers to maintain separate digital identities across a range of government agencies; and $7.5m for yet another whole-of-government digital mailbox solution.

Little wonder Shetler refers to the DTO’s mission as facilitating ‘Digital Government 2.0’.

With early and often harsh lessons in accessibility and scalability still troubling online services efforts at Centrelink, and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection still smarting from a breach of privacy wherein details of some 10,000 asylum seekers were leaked, there is a widespread sense that the public service can and must do better.

Shetler sees collaboration as a key part of the effort, with the DTO-curated Digital Service Design Guide seeking to encapsulate best-practice lessons as the new government evolves. These guidelines, case studies and other resources will help agencies in areas such as testing web accessibility, recruitment and team strategies, records management, open data, privacy, search engine optimisation and more — and they reflect the organisation’s inclusive and proactive nature.

“We’re trying to build a community, and we’re doing this in the open and doing it according to standard digital technologies and methodologies,” Shetler explained. “We’re trying to make everything we do as transparent as possible, and trying to focus it around the needs of the users rather than the organisations.”

Shepherding a range of public service agencies to comply with the evolving Digital Service Standard (DSS) guidelines was never going to be easy, but beyond his own capabilities Shetler has one extra feather in his cap: the fact that Turnbull has become prime minister.

This change is sure to cement the DTO’s relevance and give Shetler a top-down mandate for change that few in the public service can ever hope to enjoy. It will also benefit departments, who may find it easier than ever to muster both the political willpower and the funding necessary to finally overcome cost-focused infrastructure planning and instead focus on redesigning the public service to be the way it was meant to be.

Had Turnbull's party-room coup ended differently, the DTO might have faded into obscurity as yet another wide-eyed transformation exercise championed almost exclusively by a minister relegated to backbench purgatory. But with Turnbull so eager to continue the DTO’s mission that he recently moved the agency from the Department of Communications into his own Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio — putting him in charge of whole-of-government service delivery policy, public data policy and the Government 2.0 transformation — quite the opposite has happened.

This boost in the DTO’s fortunes was predicted early on by former Department of the Environment CIO and current Ovum public sector analyst Al Blake, who wrote that “with their previous champion now head of the country, it’s hard to see how DTO can go anywhere apart from up”.

“Australia now has someone who ‘gets it’ when it comes to digital delivery of government services,” he wrote, “and is not going to be prepared to accept delays, excuses and second-rate solutions. The issue now is for the ICT industry both inside and outside of the public sector to rise to the challenge and deliver on the promise of a connected, technologically literate and effective Australia.”

Shetler is ready for the challenge. His first months in the job have been a whirlwind of introductions, planning and a recruitment drive that’s rapidly filling out the DTO’s ranks with change-minded public servants ready to breathe change and agility into a sector where both of those things have long been anathema.

And while he’s under no illusions about the magnitude of the task ahead of him, Shetler — who said the DTO is offering more guidance about the “right way to do things and what would give a better result” than the UK’s GDS offered — believes the weight of progress is on his side.

“Doing digital at scale in large organisations is not easy,” he said, “and it’s something that people have really only started doing recently. But users should be able to use one government service, take their knowledge and easily access another service without having to go for training like it’s something brand new all over again.

“This is really about how we start focusing really and truly on user needs, and redesigning our services to meet them. We’re working at all levels to make that happen.”

*****************************************

How to build Government 2.0

The Digital Transformation Office's Digital Service Standard outlines 16 key expectations of Australian government agencies:

1. Understand user needs, conduct research to develop a deep knowledge of who the service users are and what that means for digital and assisted digital service design.
2. Establish a sustainable multidisciplinary team that can design, build, operate and iterate the service, led by an experienced service manager with decision-making responsibility.
3. Adopt a user-centred design approach.
4. Establish benchmarks to measure user satisfaction, digital take-up, completion rates and cost per transactions and report performance publicly.
5. Evaluate what data, tools and systems will be used to build, host, operate and measure the service and how to adopt, adapt or procure them.
6. Assess what personal user data and information the service will be providing, using or storing and put in place appropriate measures to address security risks, legal responsibilities and privacy considerations.
7. Build the service using agile, iterative, collaborative and user-centred methods.
8. Build the service with consistent look, feel, tone and function that meets the needs of users, including those with disability.
9. Use web service APIs, open standards and common government solutions where possible and make all new source code open and re-usable where appropriate.
10. Test the service on all common browsers and devices, using dummy accounts and selecting representative samples of users.
11. Integrate the service with any non-digital interactions.
12. Put appropriate assisted digital support in place that’s aimed towards those who genuinely need it.
13. Consolidate or phase out existing alternative channels where appropriate.
14. Undertake ongoing user research and usability testing to continuously inform service improvement.
15. Use data and analytics tools to collect and report performance data, informing continual service improvements.
16. Provide ongoing assurance, supported by analytics, that the service is simple and intuitive enough that users succeed first time unaided.