DTO's agenda likely to stumble, former AGIMO head warns

The federal government’s DTO will likely miss its first deadline, warns the former head of AGIMO.

The ambitious government transformation agenda led by the new Digital Transformation Office (DTO) is likely to miss its first major deadline as the ambitions of “engaged and pretty passionate” Communications Minister and DTO champion Malcolm Turnbull are weighed down by the dead weight of government process, a former government-services architect has warned.

“You won’t see anything before Christmas,” Glenn Archer, the former head of the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) and former Australian chief information officer, predicted.

Archer suggested it would be difficult to expect much real progress before 2016, even from those government bodies that meet a significant September 2015 deadline imposed on them by the DTO.

Earlier this year, a DTO mandate required former FMAA (Financial Management and Accountability Act) departments to lodge a Digital Transformation Plan (DTP) by September, outlining their strategy for compliance with the Digital Service Standard (DSS), a 16-point manifesto of design guidelines and customer-service criteria that will guide future online government efforts around seven core design principles.

Archer, who left the public sector last year to become research vice president for the public sector with Gartner, said that while the establishment of the DTO “is significantly overdue” and “provides a context for the nation to stretch ourselves”, recent claims by newly appointed DTO CEO Paul Shetler — that the DTO’s biggest challenge was “not a policy problem, it’s a delivery issue” — were off the mark.

“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,” Archer explained. “Any suggestion that the issues are due to technology and not to policy is 110% wrong.

“Policy is fundamentally constraining the opportunity for us to progress digital services,” he continued. “In many ways we have been held back by an almost single-minded focus on financial savings. Notwithstanding that, agencies and AGIMO have made significant gains for the country — but we could have done even better.”

Shetler, who commenced his new role just weeks ago after a stint at the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS), suggested in his recent maiden speech, at the recent Technology in Government conference in Canberra, that legacy technologies would be the biggest obstacle to change.

Arguing that simplifying citizen interactions with the state is an “ethical obligation as public servants”, Shetler said a core tenet of the transformation he’s leading will be to build services with a “ruthless” focus on facilitating citizen services that transcend organisational and jurisdictional boundaries across the three levels of government.

Archer, however, wasn’t so sure that the pending DTPs would contain such finely honed strategies, citing experience at AGIMO where similar agency surveys had elicited responses with quality that “varied enormously from agency to agency”.

“If I was to raise a slight concern about this survey,” he added, “it gets back to the policy versus technology issue. I would be nervous about whether the DTO has been sufficiently explicit with agencies that they need to think about this from a service delivery perspective and not from an IT perspective.

“It’s likely that it will end up being addressed by people in the CIO area, because it will be seen as being a technology issue — and responses may be framed in that way. If you do see something before Christmas, it will be a very broad commentary.”

The DTO was formed early this year as an overreaching initiative by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, but only became an official government agency on 1 July after being funded to the tune of $254.7m in the current fiscal year’s budget.

Image courtesy AltimeterGroup under CC