Speech to the FutureGov Summit

The impressive roll up at today’s FutureGov Summit is powerful evidence of how much energy is going into using information technology to transform government.

It is hugely important – and something the Abbott Government is strongly committed to.

It is my privilege to kick off proceedings by speaking about government online service delivery – and in doing so I would like to start with the question of what citizens expect of government.  Next I want to talk about the typical way that governments respond; and thirdly highlight an alternative strategy in which – shockingly – government does not try to do everything itself.

What citizens expect in dealing with government

So let’s start with what citizens expect in dealing with government – although if we are honest we should distinguish between what they expect and what they want.

What they expect is to wait in line for hours; to be required to fill in multipage hard copy forms which are incomprehensible; and for the whole experience to be lengthy, painful and frustrating.

My own personal experience of this has been having, until the start of this year, a child attending a preschool.  This required both my wife and I to regularly fill out lengthy and confusing forms in relation to the child care rebate.  It would be so much simpler if you could respond to an interactive online form.

This experience is quite typical.  Globally, governments have developed a bad reputation when it comes to service delivery for citizens – paper based forms being mailed out and mailed back in again, lengthy waiting periods and byzantine processes which are out-of-step with a world accustomed to instant, always-on communications.

What citizens want – as opposed to what they expect – is the same efficient, customer-responsive experience as they have got used to from dealing with banks, airlines, online retailers and many other private sector providers.

When a business has a commercial incentive to make the service experience as quick and easy as possible, it is amazing how good it can get.

I think back to my days as an Optus executive, watching the amount of effort the sales and marketing and operations people would put into customer communications, and the business processes – be they a call centre or online – governing a customer’s interaction in responding to that communication.

If a few seconds could be shaved off the typical transaction time, or if an additional two or three or five percent of customers could be shifted from face to face to online interactions, that was a business prize worth capturing.

In turn, you needed to give the customer a better service experience to incent them.

Just think for a moment about how much better the user experience has become as an airline passenger.

Once, users had to make bookings in the office of a travel agent, and would be issued with paper-based tickets which could take days to be processed and printed.

Some of us here are old enough to remember the announcement when you landed in a foreign country urging you to call to reconfirm your booking within 72 hours, I think it was, of your onward or return journey.

Today we expect to be able to book flights and hotels online from any device, anywhere, anytime; and have confirmation arrive via email instantly.

The service experience today, compared to twenty years ago, is phenomenally improved.

The same could be said about banking, about buying books or clothes or music, about sector after sector.

But in far too many cases it cannot be said about government.

A recent report by Boston Consulting Group titled ‘Digital Government: Turning Rhetoric Into Reality’ summarised government progress as:

“Getting better – but still plenty of room for improvement: that’s the current assessment by everyday users of their governments’ efforts to deliver online services… Many citizens – accustomed to innovation in such sectors as retailing, media, and financial services – wish their Governments would get on with it.”[1]

This viewpoint was brought home to me during a recent visit to Australia by Liam Maxwell, Chief Technology Officer for the UK Government.

As head of the UK’s ‘Government Digital Service’ initiative, Liam Maxwell is charged with reshaping the UK Government’s service delivery platform to align with user expectations.

A recent blog post by Maxwell’s team describes their approach: “We’re saying goodbye to the days of government services run as huge monolithic silos. Now we want to implement government as a platform, government made from platforms: re-usable, interconnected, easily replaced components that can be used and shared by everyone.”

The question Liam Maxwell asks of each government platform is this: “What is the user need?”

It sounds perfectly straightforward, but for governments around the world, the user need is all too often an afterthought when it comes to delivering services to citizens.

Typical Government response

The UK’s initiative stands in telling contrast to the typical government response to IT project design.

The traditional approach for governments is to try to do it all in-house, and for a department to decide what the end user wants.

The typical mindset is that government should own the data and control the data within departmental silos.

But this approach is increasingly incompatible with end user needs in the digital age.

The National Commission of Audit released earlier this year found that in 2012, 50 percent of the services provided by the Department of Human Services were not conducted online. The ATO still sends out 10 million notices a year in hardcopy.

In some areas there has been good progress. For example, myGov provides a central account linked to Medicare, Centrelink, the Taxation office, Child Support, the Department of Health, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the National Disability Insurance Agency services. The site has around 5 million registered users and is accessed by over 150,000 users each week.

Some other areas where progress has been solid have been online tax returns, the processing of many visas electronically, and electronic cargo manifests.

But there is much yet to be done, and Australians are clamouring for more. Recent research indicates that over 80 per cent of Australians expect to be able to deal with government online.[2]

Yet according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, in the six months to May 2013, only 8.95 million people accessed government services at all levels (local, state and federal) online. 

This level of take up suggests that the services on offer may not be what users expect. For instance, they may not in fact be digital from end to end – after completing part of a transaction online, a user may be expected to travel to a government office for a face-to-face interview.

It could also be because the services aren’t optimised for smart phones and tablets.

There is another way

If we have a clear appetite from citizens – but performance by government which to date does not meet their expectations – then the obvious question arises: what do we need to do differently?

One very interesting answer to this question is contained in the white paper by NICTA, entitled “New Models for Digital Government: the role of service brokers in driving innovation.”

The white paper describes the key challenges in driving further adoption of online government services, such as the siloed approach I described earlier.

It argues that one way to address these challenges is through better utilisation of third party ‘service brokers’ to help end users access government services in a more efficient manner.

The concept of using service brokers is not new – tax agents assist citizens in completing and filing tax returns; community organisations assist jobseekers to find work utilising government-funded employment programmes.

More recently, government adoption of open data policies has led to a flourishing of new service broker apps.  One of my personal favourites is TripView. This handy smartphone app uses open data on public transport services to provide users with real-time information on bus, train and ferry timetables.  

There is nothing better when you are sitting in your office in Lindfield wondering when it is time to leave to get the train into the city.  The app was not developed by government, nor is it funded by government, but it provides a valuable service to end users.

A fascinating case study of this service broker model highlighted in the NICTA white paper is HubCare. HubCare is an Australian company which provides a technology platform to connect child-care service providers, end users and the relevant government departments which fund and regulate these services.

From the end-user’s perspective, in this case the parent or guardian of the child, the platform enables them to easily manage payments, government subsidies and information about their child such as allergies and medications.

For the provider, the platform simplifies the processes involved with dealing with multiple government departments, and for the government it means the complex process of establishing a technology platform has effectively been outsourced, alleviating the need for departments to do everything themselves.

Having met Ruby O’Rourke, the dynamic founder of this service, earlier this year, I was amazed by her story – and the way she identified a user need and set about developing the technology to fix it.  Her service now has around 1.4 million end users around Australia.

Given my own recent experience with a child in preschool, it did not take much to persuade me of the benefits of her approach.

The NICTA paper concludes that “Digital Government has the potential to gain great benefit from leveraging the capabilities and strengths of service brokers. However, barriers need to be removed as well as opportunities created to test and evaluate new models for service delivery and citizen engagement.”

New approach is worth encouraging

In my view this paper makes a very worthwhile contribution to the lively public policy debate about how best to deliver online services.  It fits with some of the key themes in the policy of ‘Convenient Service Anytime Anywhere’ that the Coalition took to the 2013 election.

This policy was, in part, inspired by the UK Government’s initiative where experience has shown that online transactions are 20 times cheaper than transactions over the phone, 30 times cheaper than postal transactions and a staggering 50 times cheaper than face-to-face transactions.

The UK Government estimates that moving to online channels for transactional services is likely to cut the cost of service delivery by one fifth. 

Here in Australia the Minister for Communications and the Minister for Finance are leading the government’s transformation in the way it uses ICT to deliver services to the public.

The Coalition’s goal is that by the end of 2017 all major services and interactions will be available to the public online, making government more accessible and more efficient.

The internet will be designated as the default way to interact with most users. In particular, we have set a goal that all services with more than 50,000 interactions per year should be made available online by 2017.

Our approach encompasses all aspects of service design including a redesign of business processes from the “bottom up” to take advantage of the opportunities provides by digital service delivery.  It involves a user-centric view of service delivery which is focused on efficiency and convenience. For this reason, the government has undertaken to publish a Digital Service Standard and Design Guide to ensure consistent service design across government agencies.

The availability of digital services across multiple platforms and devices is key. Mobile accessibility over smart phones and tables is going to be a key driver of take up.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by congratulating the organisers of this important conference, and also NICTA for developing this insightful white paper.

Recent developments in technology have allowed for services to be delivered in ways which would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

This is just as true for governments as it is for the private sector, and there are a range of benefits available to governments which embrace new approaches to service delivery, such as the use of service brokers.

Even more importantly, there are very significant benefits for citizens – the end users of services provided by government.

I hope that the FutureGov Summit provides you all with the opportunity to build on these ideas, and to develop new and innovative ways of delivering government services to citizens.

[1] BCG Report Digital Government: Turning Rhetoric Into Reality p3

[2] ACMA’s Communications Report (2012-13), p. 124