Five ways government agencies can modernise successfully

The Australian Government has made significant strides towards digital modernisation and digitisation to improve community experiences. Indeed, it’s a strategic priority for the government, which has its sights set on being a top 10 digital economy and society by 2030. The strategy includes investment in critical projects, including 5G, payment systems and general technology infrastructure.

But modernisation in government takes on extra layers of complexity as organisational silos, skills shortages, a risk-averse culture and funding challenges are deeply entrenched. The risks of not taking action are equally concerning, as departments may lose sustained funding and fail to meet community expectations in a digital-first world.

These challenges boil down to five key areas government agencies need to prioritise across technology, people and process.

Leadership

Government agencies face pressure to ensure modernisation efforts are delivered securely and safely, minimising financial and operational risk. After all, these solutions can affect the lives of countless Australians.

The old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” resonates in risk-averse teams, and can feel like a reasonable course of action given the inherent risk in any transformation. But departments like the digital transformation agency are demonstrating what’s possible when there is a clear vision for the future of community interactions, with defined benefits for every project.

The most successful transformation projects occur when leadership promotes experimentation and collaboration. In practice, this happens when there is a common purpose and vision, departmental silos are removed and continuous learning is encouraged. This point is particularly salient, as Red Hat’s Global Tech Outlook report found that skill-set or talent gaps emerged as the top barrier organisations believe will prevent them from achieving their digital transformation goals.

Another important factor that can change the course of a transformation project is the leadership teams taking the necessary steps to lead projects and make critical decisions. This signals that the leadership is willing and able to drive change, and acts as a motivator for others across the organisation to participate and contribute. This is a lesson Red Hat learned many years ago, leading many open source software (OSS) projects, and then inspiring others to contribute and be a part of that change. In addition to traditional hygiene factors, displaying innovation can inspire and retain top talent.

Product

Software must support the mission. There’s often a perception that public services must eliminate their existing IT architecture and mainframes to increase interoperability as they modernise. But the reality is more complex than that, especially when the implications of a failed project have real-world consequences for communities. This is why each agency must have a clear strategy to define what users need, want and can easily use.

For example, some agencies rely on flexible systems that can scale up and down based on periods of intense activity, such as the end of financial year. Government agencies, therefore, do well to understand the constraints and needs of their organisation, and work with a trusted partner to overcome them in a safe and scalable way.

The best way to do this is to create a hypothesis and then build a prototype to test it. This helps to minimise the project risks and creates a sandbox where tests can safely ‘fail’. Agencies can also adopt employee guardrails, providing built-in controls for enforcement to reduce operational risk. Modern platforms embed this functionality in developer workflows and the software supply chain.

Development

Above all, software must meet the defined mission requirements. Product and operations teams do well to adopt a ‘trusted software supply chain’ methodology where test-driven development (TDD) and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is the norm.

To avoid ‘over-engineering’ a solution, building with a ‘minimum viable product’ mindset allows for more rapid waves of feedback that can be quickly incorporated into the product with less friction. This approach is referred to as ‘agile’, which describes a process of rapid development, called ‘sprints’, with regular ‘scrums’ to review and test. A digital transformation project would involve lots of easily tracked sprints to ensure each stage is delivered in a timely and scalable manner.

Automation can also help to offload manual processes spanning architecture, development and operations. This should be done in a measured way where IT managers can provide guidelines on how automation is applied to individual teams.

Automation enables organisations to take a 24/7 approach to run and manage process workflow. The ability to automate key functions like security scanning and patching, network scaling and descaling, and alert and response functions means the workforce can be effective even after they clock off. This can increase productivity and output greatly and amplifies the success of software development projects.

Architecture

Community expectations are rapidly evolving as they become accustomed to digital services in every aspect of their lives. To keep pace, software must be not only scalable, but flexible.

Event-driven architecture, which enables applications to respond to events in real time, provides the flexibility to pick and choose technologies as community expectations change. In this approach, each ‘event’, such as someone filing their tax return, triggers an update in back-end systems — in this case the return would now be marked as lodged and then completed once it has been assessed.

Furthermore, with an open hybrid cloud approach, government agencies can take advantage of their existing hybrid IT while setting themselves up for future technological advances as no one cloud provider or on-premises environment is capable of meeting the diverse and competing needs of government use environments, and proprietary solutions can restrict choices and adaptability in the future.

Operations

Government agencies can, understandably, not afford outages and downtime. At the same time, new features need to be deployed at speed. In the ‘start on the path toward site reliability engineering (SRE)’ model, operations teams give development teams space to code until an ‘error budget’ is met — the maximum allowed number of times something can fail without consequences. Development then stops and the focus shifts to technical debt.

This approach works well for agencies that employ a DevSecOps model where development, security and operations teams work hand in hand throughout the life cycle of a project rather than in silos. It also encompasses an organisational approach to modernisation, where security and innovation become a shared responsibility across teams.

The Australian Government should be applauded for its focus and commitment to modernisation. By focusing on these key five areas of transformation — leadership, product, development, architecture and operations — and adopting best practice in each pillar, they will be well placed to modernise in a safe, scalable and repeatable manner.

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