Improvement in governance is the goal, innovation and transformation are simply techniques to help it along

Over the last year in Australian government there's been increasing rhetoric around transformation (primarily digital) and innovation.

This has come both from the political level, particularly since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister, and from the administrative level, as the Secretary's Board and an increasing number of senior public servants have internalised these terms within their approach to gain funding and support for their activities.

I'm a big support of innovation within government. Where government seeks to improve internal efficiency and external effectiveness, innovation - as a technique for exploring, testing and trialing new approaches - is a key strategy for achieving improvement.

In my view digital transformation is part of this innovation track, with a particular focus on using digital technologies, and the strategies and tactics they enable, to help improve governance and operations across the public sector.

As such both innovation and digital transformation are important techniques that should form part of the 'toolkit' of every public sector employee.

However, in all this rush to secure innovation rushing and transform service delivery via digital tools, public servants and politicians alike must ensure they focus on the goals they are seeking to achieve, not simply the (shiny new) tools they are using to achieve them.

The goal - as it has been for hundreds of years - is to improve the operations of government and ensure that, within the budgets available, governments deliver the best possible experience and, particularly, outcomes, for their 'owners' - citizens.

Innovation is not the goal, it is a method used to achieve the goal, whatever that might be.

Similarly digital transformation is a technique for shifting services between delivery or processing channels in order to deliver more convenient and effective outcomes for the service recipient, potentially with the secondary goal of a more cost-effective, reduced-error service delivery approach for the provider.

Within all the rhetoric abut innovation and digital transformation we've heard from governments, and with the large amount I expect we'll continue to hear this year, keep in mind the end goal - improving government efficiency and effectiveness.

Innovation and transformations do not, by themselves, improve government. They are simply techniques and can be implemented both well and badly, depending on the people, culture and environment they are employed within.

Indeed in certain cases innovation can make things worse - harder, slower, less reliable - or have unforeseen consequences that end up costing government more, and reducing its effectiveness overall.

So look for the outcomes of innovation and digital transformation.

Does an agency's innovation approach reduce costs, reduce error rates, increase satisfaction or improve outcomes for the services and systems to which it is applied?

Last year we heard the talk about innovation and digital transformation. This year we'll start seeing the first outcomes from some of the most highly funded agencies and offices tasked with these techniques.

This year, 2016, will be the test of whether government agencies in Australia are effectively implementing innovation, shifting their culture and administrative biases to facilitate successful innovation and resulting in real improvements in citizen welfare and government operations.

I hope we hear the successes shouted from the rooftops.

Silence can only mean that this has been a failed experiment, with senior public servants using innovation as a way to buffer declining budgets rather than make measureable improvements in how Australian government operations.

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What does membership of the Open Government Partnership mean for Australia?

On 24 November Prime Minister Turnbull sent a letter to the global Open Government Partnership (OGP) Secretariat confirming that Australia would progress to full membership of the OGP by July 2016 (continuing the process started by the former Labor Government in May 2013).

Australia will become the 69th member of the OGP, joining countries such as the USA, UK, Canada, The Philippines, Mongolia and India.

The consultation process is now underway, supported through the OGPau website and a consultation wiki at ogpau.wikispaces.com.

I've been supporting the process through facilitating a number of Information Sessions on behalf of PM&C to help build community awareness about the initiative, to address questions and build engagement with the process.

Canberra's session was livestreamed and the raw replay is below.


I am also involved in the establishment of the Australian Open Government Partnership Network, a network of civil societies and individuals that support the goals of the OGP and aim to work productively with the Australian Government to help Australia achieve them as a nation.

If you're outside government and wish to stay informed about the process, or get involved in a network of people interested in the OGP's goals, learn more at aogpn.net

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Australian Tax Office (finally) considering going digital by default, but walk and talk don't match

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) is currently asking Australians what they think of the idea of the ATO going digital by default.

As they rightly point out in the Consultation paper, the current ability of the ATO to do this is restricted by legislation, which often defines the channels by which certain transactions can occur or services be provided, not simply the desired outcomes and outputs.

This kind of policy blindness to digital is to be expected in legislation developed before the 1990s, or even the 2000s, and can take substantial time to unwind and correct. It's less acceptable (though sometimes still present) in more recent legislation - reflecting a failure to learn and understand the impact of digital on the modern world.

For the ATO these policy issues have meant a constant challenge to work within their legislative framework to still deliver the best possible services to clients, thereby prompting accurate and timely payment of taxes and funding the government's operations.

To complicate matters further, the ATO has been shedding highly experienced staff in a series of budget cuts that, in my view, have severely degraded their ability to operate effectively.

I am glad to see this consultation occurring, however feel that the way in which they are doing it leaves much to be desired and, in my view, weakens my trust in the ATO's ability to go digital by default in a manner that maximises tax compliance through making it easier and simpler for people to meet their obligations.

The form provided for feedback has some unusual restrictions on the number of characters used in responding to the consultation paper, making it difficult for those of us who care to fully flesh out our answers with evidence and perspectives.

When submitting the form there's no acknowledgement of the submission - a standard in most online engagement processes today in order to 'complete the loop' and have people feel listened to and acknowledged. I did (after 40 minutes) receive an email with my submission, which is good, but is hardly the immediate feedback people should expect.

On top of this, the consultation itself seems to focus on a 'stick' approach to gaining compliance as the ATO goes digital by default.

There's no discussion of how the ATO will ensure that digital services are better and easier to use than their offline equivalents in order to create a natural pull effect as people walk downhill to the easier way of completing their tax obligations.

There's discussion of penalties for people who are slow to shift to digital services, but no discussion of rewards for those who move quickly and decisively. A stick without carrot approach rooted in old-style punishment-based thinking.

I think the ATO would be far better placed looking at ways to gameify tax paying, creating rewards for good behaviour and making the system habit-forming rather than a chore.

There's opportunities for the ATO to work across the tax ecosystem, into GST registration, company formation and key life events which lead to tax implications - graduations and retirements, new jobs and redundancies - simplifying the end-to-end system to make it a smoother and seamless process for addressing tax issues, directly or via other connections.

There's enormous opportunities for the ATO to API the tax approach, allowing third-party apps and services to be developed on top of tax paying, as the Canadian tax office already has done. In this scenario the ATO is the support service and engine, but not the interface, meaning they can run a better service with fewer staff and lower costs.

However the biggest opportunity is to move to a codesign approach for tax services, where taxpayers design the services and the ATO implements and manages them. In this scenario it wouldn't be the traditional senior public servants and Ministers approving the services and tweaking them to meet what they believe people want and need, instead it would be the actual taxpayers designing the services they wish to interact with and then approving the systems the ATO develops.

Definitely digital by default is a path the ATO must walk, but whether it walks it well and successfully should really be the key question and goal.

A consultation is a good first step, but the ATO needs to demonstrate that it isn't just walking the path, but is doing so with eyes and minds open, with a goal of the best outcomes for tax collection, via creating services that people don't hate to use.

The way the ATO designed the consultation itself is the first example of the ATO's commitment and approach to developing an appropriate digital by default approach - and thus far it leaves me concerned.

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New data report signals a major shift in data thinking in the senior Australian public service

While successive Australian governments have touted 'evidence-based policy', a significant ongoing challenge within Australia's public service has been generating or accessing the right data at the right time - particularly across agencies - for actually testing policy assumptions and following a more agile policy development process.

I've personally witnessed the challenges within agencies of being able to locate useful and usable data for program design and delivery assessment, and the mechanics for sharing data between agencies, requiring formal agreements and long discovery and lead-times.

One of the more signficant side-effects of the open data revolution has been to highlight to agencies how little they know about the data they already collect and hold, who owns it (agency or external parties) and how hard it can be to share productively between agencies, let alone with the public.

A significant initiative this year was the commissioning of an internal data report by the Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, named the Public Sector Data Management report.

This report was designed to help the Australian Public Service (APS) understand its internal data landscape and recommend steps that could be taken to improve how data is generated, managed, discovered, shared and therefore used in policy and program development and evaluation.

Put simply, if the APS can get its approach on data right, suddenly it would become far clearly to both internal and external stakeholders how effective various government programs were, and clarify policy gaps and opportunities.

This internal report, now released publicly under Creative Commons licensing, offers a glimpse into how effectively data has been used in the APS, and recommends a strong series of measures to strengthen data collection, sharing and use.

If anything speaks to the commitment within the APS to use and share data more effectively, this report does. It's worth not only a read, but a close study.

The Public Sector Data Management report is now available online via the data.gov.au blog at blog.data.gov.au/news-media/blog/public-sector-data-management.

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Register now for an OGP Australia information session

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have just announced a series of information sessions regarding the Open Government Partnership and the process by which the Australian government is seeking to involve the community and civil organisations in the development of our first National Action Plan by the end of June 2016.

For information on these sessions, which will occur in the week of 14-18 December in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, visit the OGP Australia blog at: ogpau.govspace.gov.au/register-to-attend-an-ogp-australia-information-session/

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