Driving transformation from the citizen's perspective

It may have kickstarted the NSW Government’s digital transformation effort years before the term came into vogue, but a key figure in the state’s digital transformation said Service NSW’s journey is still in its early days as that government continues reinventing itself with a ‘co-design’ approach that’s focused on improving outcomes for citizens.

The formation of Service NSW — which delivers over 800 state government transactions through a single interface — was a “tremendous step forward”, said Penny Webb-Smart, executive director for service reform within the NSW Department of Finance, Services & Innovation. But the real innovation in government transformation, she said, is coming as increasingly digital services focus not on ‘as-is services’ — such as renewing a driver’s licence online instead of at a branch office — but on new ways to configure citizen interaction with government services.

The successful early transformation “really opened the door to start thinking about the much broader sweep of public services from a citizen perspective”, said Webb-Smart, who presented the department’s approach at IQPC’s recent Digital Disruption X conference.

As a government, she said, “we need to stop thinking from an inside-out perspective, and that ‘we’re a government and this is what we do because we’ve always done it this way’”.

Relationship-building weighs heavily in the co-design process, with users involved in the design process and outside partners regularly involved to float as many potentially good ideas as possible.

“There are lots of people working outside government who have good ideas for how we might redesign public services,” Webb-Smart said. “Not all of those are going to be great ideas, of course, but the key is having some process where we could filter and process those ideas. People who want to innovate should be talking to each other to learn how they are successful.”

One effort she pointed to was ChildStory, a process to redesign the IT tools by which the NSW Department of Family & Community Services (FACS) — as part of the state government’s ‘Safe Home for Life’ legislation package — maintains ongoing case portfolios that bundle a range of government interventions into a single ‘story’ related to the child.

This type of interaction — described as part of “a less legalistic, process-driven child protection system” that “places children and their families at the centre of decision making” — emerged from the co-design system that Webb-Smart believes will rapidly come to typify more mature project management within all manner of NSW Government departments.

“The starting point for ChildStory was that we really needed to replace our ageing IT system, which was no longer relevant,” she explained.

“The FACS team recognised that the answer wasn’t just to replace the IT system with another one; they said ‘Let’s start with what it is that we’re trying to achieve, understanding what’s happening in the lives of children and their families, and the circumstances in which FACS becomes involved’.”

This process generated extensive research into the FACS process as well as a number of ‘small-scale prototypes’, through the Agile-like co-design process. “We work to deeply understand what’s happening and design a service that we think will solve the problem,” Webb-Smart said. “If that works, we progressively built it out so it would be much more of a test-and-learn approach.”

This type of project methodology is rapidly spreading across the NSW Government, Webb-Smart said, with “every cluster across the NSW Government” now having examples of a humanistic approach to service design that looks well beyond the simple digitisation of existing services.

All on a journey together

Service reinvention has become a core strategy for CIOs in 2016, according to the 2016 Gartner CIO Agenda Report, which surveyed 2944 CIOs in 84 countries and found that public sector CIOs expect digital processes will rise from 42% to 77% of all processes.

“The deepening of digital means that lines are becoming increasingly blurred, and boundaries semiporous,” the report’s authors note, “as multiple networks of stakeholders bring value to each other by exploiting and exploring platform dynamics.”

Building ‘platform views’ of the business emphasises the value of business resources that join together, both temporarily and permanently, to create value by connecting resources into a larger whole that benefits from extensive network effects.

“Digital leadership is a team sport,” the report notes. “To succeed, CIOs must rethink and retool their approach to all the layers of their business’s platform, not just the technical one.”

Complementary technologies such as data analytics are providing additional inputs to the process, which also dovetails with ongoing trending towards open government and the open release of government data sets by agencies such as Transport for NSW.

“The challenge now is to scale those efforts and enable those individuals to join up” for projects where responsibilities span individual agencies’ jurisdictions, Webb-Smart said, noting that the co-design process was still at the leading edge of global government innovation.

Transformation within Service NSW and associated agencies was also happening in parallel with the efforts of the Commonwealth Digital Transformation Office (DTO), which is undergoing a similar process of reinvention at the federal level and is, through the establishment of a range of technical and process guidelines, taking on a similar role as curator of the vocabulary of government reinvention.

Ultimately, that reinvention will come as more government agencies forego traditional policy-driven, top-down project design and actively engage with citizens throughout the life of new projects. This might include, for example, actively testing beta versions of mobile apps or sitting in a room and testing service prototypes with relevant citizens to solicit their feedback throughout the design process.

“Innovation doesn’t happen because someone senior sits in an office and says ‘I think it would be a good idea to innovate’,” Webb-Smart said.

“Bold innovation will happen because you have a process for the discovery and iteration where you put ideas into practice and test them, and stop them if they don’t work. It’s really starting from a point where you say ‘We don’t know the answer’ and testing in the real world, talking to real users.”

Despite popular perceptions that government workers are risk averse, Webb-Smart — who joined the Department of Finance, Services and Innovation a year ago — said she has seen an endemic culture where “almost without exception I have been really impressed not only by the calibre of public servants, but by the fact that what they want is to deliver better services”.

“The tools of co-design and the digital economy give new options for public servants who have long wanted to be able to solve problems that have been around for a long time,” she said, noting that government agencies are still finding their way through co-design and broader transformation agendas.

“All governments are on this journey somewhere, but there is no natively digital government you can point to and say, ‘They’ve got it right’. We’re basically all on this journey.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Penny Webb-Smart is the head of Service NSW.

Pictured: Penny Webb-Smart