Short-term delivery to effect long-term transformation

Australia’s public service has built an “inspiring” culture of transformation in which customer service is highly valued. But there is still work to be done in shifting to a more iterative culture of service development, one transformation expert has advised, as industry analysts peg 2016 as a banner year for cloud-led government transformation.

A renewed focus on customer service experience — putatively driven by the federal Digital Transformation Office (DTO) and its aggressive transformation agenda — had differentiated Australia’s public service from highly siloed, deliberate funding efforts in the United States and customer feedback-driven enhancements in Europe, Pegasystems’ Global Public Sector Business Line Leader Doug Averill told GTR.

“Australia seems to have a more citizen-centric view about how they are doing transformation,” Averill explained. “It’s really inspiring in a lot of ways because, almost universally, Australia is taking a fresh look at how they’re servicing citizens and providing services to those citizens in an integrated way.”

External pressures were also playing a role in transformation efforts here and abroad, with ever-tightening budgets forcing agencies to become more internally efficient and, increasingly, to work together to improve their operations.

These partnerships, whether born out of necessity or collaborative spirit, were catalysed by transformation efforts that are “incentivising agencies to work together to develop applications that deliver value faster and are all about re-use”, he said.

Shared componentry lies at the heart of many of the DTO’s ongoing efforts, including its work on projects arranged in six Digital Delivery Hubs that include collaborations with the likes of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the Queensland Government — which will work with the DTO to publicly launch several projects over the next few months.

These early wins may be drops in the bucket given the scope of the transformation ahead of Australia’s government agencies, but they reflect the growing tide of change that is expected to keep digital transformation efforts — along with cloud-first policies, which are seen as significant drivers for transformation — at the forefront of the government agenda in coming years.

This year will be “the banner year for digital transformation to take root in many Asia/Pacific organisations”, IDC noted in a recent paper that forecast fully one-third of regional enterprises will pursue a cloud-first strategy, with 26% of IT budgets dedicated to cloud services this year.

By 2016, enterprises will “flip the switch”, the firm argues, with fully 65% of regional enterprise strategies including significant digital-transformation elements. By 2017, 60% of digital transformation adopters will have created an independent corporate executive role to manage the transformation.

This rapid growth curve suggests that formal government transformation efforts have correctly tapped into latent desire among public sector leaders to foster dramatic innovation and cultural change, Averill noted.

“There’s a lot of collaboration and sharing that can be done,” he explained. “I find almost universally that agencies want to understand best practices and want to be able to share.”

Lingering cultural incompatibility with staid government IT-investment realities — so often handicapped by draconian procurement processes and chronically insecure budgets — meant that public sector organisations need to tap into the desire for change by embracing agile change processes focused in incremental delivery.

This process can be meaningfully informed by thinking of transformation in the way that mobile app vendors think of their tools. “Our phones get application updates every two to three weeks, and that’s what we need to be thinking in government because that’s how our citizens are thinking,” Averill explained.

“Don’t think that you have to do it all in the first release and don’t wait five years to go live. Do something that takes three months and go live, even if it’s not everything you wanted. But it’s a constant journey and you can continue to add functionality. By taking a stepwise approach, you’re much more responsive to any of the operational and legislative changes that might be coming at you.”