egov201320.093/10/2018
John Sheridan:
It’s a funny word mob because most other countries use it in a completely different way but in Australia we speak of a ‘mob’ of kangaroos or a mob of sheep or a mob of cattle even. People talk about what your mob is doing today, what my mob did last week and it shows, I think, that sometimes between countries there can be completely different usages of words, different systems that you think mean the same thing but sometimes they actually don’t. I’m going to talk to you today about our experience of eGovernment over the last several years, 10 years perhaps. I’m going to talk about the things that we’ve discovered and the things we’ve learnt as a consequence of our work. I hope that some of this is useful for you in what you’re doing and of course I am struck by the similarities that I’ve already seen between the work in Singapore and the work in the U.K. and indeed in other countries with that which we are doing but of course as they say on the internet your mileage may vary and what I want to make sure is you think… realise that some of the things are the circumstances that work for us, they’re not always going to be the things that work for you.
Recently I looked again at the statistics of who is using Facebook in Australia and I determined againa very interesting statistic. About 50% of Australians use Facebook at the moment and you think well that’s OK, lots of people are doing that. When you take out the fact that there are about 19% of Australians who are 15 and under and many of those don’t have their own Facebook accounts necessarily or to some extent are supervised by their parents and there are about 5% of Australians who are older than 80 and realistically, without wishing to offend any of them including my mum, they are using those things but perhaps not as often as other people. What that tells you then is that the ratio of people between 15 and 80 that are using Facebook to the ratio of those that aren’t is probably two to one and yet I’m puzzled every day to read in the IT sections of our newspapers, to look at articles online that this notion that we’re not very technology oriented, that this is somehow a new thing and we should be changing what we’re doing now, only recently and not picking up that in fact citizens in Australia are very well engaged in the digital economy already. Yes they want more, yes they want new things but they know what it is they’re doing now.
Let’s look at this graph on a recent report and I’ll touch on the report later. It just talks about the amount of data that is downloaded and even without reading the detail you can see the enormous increase over time in Australia of downloaded data. Now this isn’t new, so I know it happens in your countries as well. It again though reinforces the notion that this is what people are coming to expect. We know that the technology that our children are largely exposed to from a very young age changes the way they think about what things are going on. When I joined the public service one expected that there’d be more technology at work than there was at home. And now the reverse is completely true. There is much more technology available in people’s everyday lives.
At a recent conference I asked my audience how many of them had voluntarily looked under the bonnet of their cars in the last six months and not surprisingly very few had and if you think about that they’re still driving every day but the way cars have developed, modern cars have developed they have the indicator lights that show you when you need lights, they have indicator lights that show you when you need to put air in the tires, you get a message on the screen when you need to service it. The skills that you need to drive a car which might be particularly high technology in some circumstances are actually well known and basic. Indeed our children seem to get them with a licence at 17 and never have to go back and test them again. Now I know from my experience that that’s not a problem in my case because I’m a wonderful driver but I do worry about some of the other people, whether they’ve been checked recently about their technology skills. The challenge, I think, is to recognise that we’re moving to a new way of delivering services.
Now we’ve done a series of six surveys over time the last one in 2011 published last year but look at what citizens expect from e-Government and what they’re using e-Government for. One of the interesting challenges I think about this is to see that the e-Government… that the use of e-Government, so the 54% you can see on that slide which is context the phone and the internet has changed the way that people are using these services. Indeed we’ve actually stopped doing this particular survey and the reason we had to stop is that the questions were no longer relevant. The questions that we’d started in the early 2000s asking them in this next decade has no useful relevance and we’re in the process of designing a new way of testing e-Government satisfaction.
We have to some extent I think developed something of a steady state in some of our services. About a third of the people use the internet, about a third use the telephone, about a third do get services in person and that doesn’t sound unusual particularly and you think well “Why isn’t there more work in e-Government?” But what we actually see is a very interesting trend and I think if you were a general practitioner, a doctor, you would see this when patients come to see you. Very often the citizen, the patient, has looked up their problem, disease on the internet at very great length. Now they might not be right mind you, they might have worked out a completely different disease but when they come and see you it’s because they’ve researched what they’ve needed to do and they’ve got to the stage that now they’re ready to engage and get the transaction done and I think this is an interesting challenge for us because what we need to do is move from this state where I look online for information but then I must engage with a person, be it on the telephone or in person, to the stage where I can actually get those transactional things done completely online. And we do see that people are using those skills and using what they’ve got to do some of that work. This shows again from the same survey what people did in their last transaction with government. About a quarter of them seeking information, probably slightly less than that were providing information to government, about a fifth were exchanging information from government, almost a quarter were getting a payment from government and we certainly like that the best and fifteen percent were making a payment to government. So there’s a range of transactions and the challenge for us is to look at what else we can do to improve these things.
In 2009 we created a taskforce that looked at Gov2.0 and the taskforce ran for six months and it looked at ways that we could improve the use of interaction with citizens and other stakeholders using Gov2.0 technologies. Since then we’ve seen an enormous growth in the use of those technologies and I’m going to run through a few of those things for you in the next couple of slides. Interestingly enough though, what I see is that there are different things being done in social media than there are in other services and organisations are doing them in different ways. It’s important, I think, to recognise and avoid the confusion of two things. The notion that e-Government is about technology or the notion that Gov2.0 is about social media. Whereas the latter in each case are essential parts of what it is you’re doing, they’re not the driving force, they are a means not an end. And I think it’s important because people like to be able to measure things. It’s important not to measure our success on the way that we use a tool but rather what it is that we do with the tool. One of the things I often hear is the notion amongst agencies that we need a social media strategy and I always say when I hear that “Carpenters don’t have hammer strategies, mechanics don’t have spark plug strategies, what tradesmen do is they use the tools to achieve an outcome and what we want to make sure is that we’re using these tools to get better engagement with citizens and get better arrangements for them.”
Although I haven’t shown them on this slide there are a couple of useful things you might want to look at. Data.gov.au – our version of the open data platform. We’re inthe process of moving that from its original platform to a new SECAM-based platform and we’re about to put it more into the public cloud. It is already in the public cloud but we’re about to do more of that and the reason we’re doing that is to address exactly the same issues you heard about his morning in both Singapore and the U.K. the notion of having this machine readable data sets. We have a lot of data sets, not just the ones that are on data.gov.uk. We’ve been providing tender information above $10,000 for many years, since 1999. One of the first things I did when I picked up my new procurement role was to publish that data in readable data sets on our data.gov.au platform and it’s interesting the way that’s opened up new analysis possibilities. But also its allowed us to do something that’s very important which is because we’ve opened that data up we’ve been able to say to people who are ask us “Well just go and look on the website, it’s there, we’ve provided that data for you already,” and that’s been useful.
One of the more interesting things we’ve seen is the development of My School website which rates schools across the country according to their success in national tests. This has been somewhat controversial for a range of reasons that would be obvious to you around competing for schools, pressures on schools and the things that it develops but it’s been very popular amongst citizens because all of us want to make sure our children are getting a better deal.
We have also run a lot of competitions like GovHack and GovCamp. Recently two weekends ago I was at the GovHack that we’d run across the country, by volunteers, some of them work for me but they’re still volunteers, 1000 people across the country in about eight capital cities, 130 teams developing products that can be used by government and we see success in running some of those. Maybe it’s only a couple of percent of those but some of them are getting legs and are turning into applications that we’re offering.
Engaging with citizens online has also been important to us and we’ve learnt some useful lessons about what it is we do to discuss with people and how we can explain our policies. Now there are always going to be some policies that are more amenable to conducting a reasonable exchange online and we have a challenge, I think, in public service generally of working out how we balance those discussions with citizens in a way that reflects broader views and not just particularly biased ones and indeed that is a challenge and there are a range of techniques we’ve seen used usefully to do that around balanced forums, around how long things are open, solid moderation policies and those arrangements but it’s been very interesting to see the discussion that we have and the ability to do useful things by blogging about them first. Our probity requirements in procurement have always allowed us to tell everybody everything or nobody anything and because it was impossible before the internet to tell everybody everything at once our preference was to tell nobody anything and this became a real challenge for us. What we can do now is put our draft statements of requirements and our draft contracts on the web, invite discussion, get industry involved and produce a better product in the end.
The next lesson I think has been to go to where people are. This is just a discussion of a particular theme in a little niche IT world that I’ve been running recently but you’ll see in human services delivery in a range of things you don’t set up a chat group on your own website and hope people will come there. You need, if you’re delivering services in government, to find where those discussions are going on and go out and engage with the people who are conducting them. You’ve got to look at the channels that you’re using and how you’re going to use them to get the best effect. NUTV is a YouTube channel that’s been very useful to discuss immigration in Australia to provide multilingual access to resources and across the world demonstratethe difficulties that some people have in pursuing inappropriate ways to enter Australia or difficult ways to enter Australia and getting that sort of information out, again in channels that people can directly access has been a big bonus for us.
I think we are seeing in government work with citizens the same sort of thing that we saw in management in the perhaps 60s and 70s and 80s – the notion of taking out middle management layers, taking out the people whose job it is just to interpret a message and not much more than that, up or down, and getting the direct connection with the citizens and we’re able by using these technologies to take out the media filtering or sieve of those messages and make sure we can say what we want.
It’s also appropriate to use the right means of addressing people. Look at the audience and see what it is that people want to do, how they are going to engage and the methods that they’re going to do that. This is a Facebook page for The Line, it’s an Australian Government initiative intheFamily and Community Services Department that looks at engaging young people and talking about what are appropriate relationships. It’s not a helpline in the sense you don’t go there to report something that’s wrong but it’s to get discussions around how behaviour can be appropriate, what’s the right message to give for young people in certain circumstances. Now clearly this isn’t a Facebook page that perhaps people of my age are going to look at, it’s targeted at a particular audience and we’re able to do those things better with the consequence of these resources.
Of course as well as all that Gov2.0 stuff there’s actually the delivery of services and about two weeks ago we launched our new citizen portal services for these services myGov. Previously essential MyAccount function had been run by my division over the last couple of years. We got to the fact that there were two million accounts, one point five million accounts linked with various services in the Department of Human Services and we decided it was time to sort of industrialise that, move it out of those things and give it to the much larger Department of Human Services to run and across agencies. And we’re seeing a big take up of these things. Personally controlled electronic health records, the ability to look online, tell the government once what you want done or has changed and continue to develop those services. That’s been really useful I think, as a means of getting better services to citizens. It’s also constructed in a way that’s been an issue or avoids an issue for Australia that’s been a problem previously which is the notion that people choose what services they want to share with government, the one-off connections they want to share with government. They choose to have their program services linked in a way that will provide them better information and I don’t think this is unusual because we see that every day in online services. I don’t mind that Amazon knows I like reading books about technology and about the US civil war because they deliver me stuff then that I can buy, read, absorb immediately and that’s a useful change in the way services are delivered. People I think are increasingly seeing if they can control how those interactions occur they’re willing to surrender perhaps a bit of their privacy in order to get better services. And I think that trend is going to continue.
The minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy last week launched an update of our Digital First policy and I’d recommend it to you but I wanted to just touch on a few of these issues at the moment. The first is an indication that people will use online services four out of five times by 2020 and that’s a considerable change from what’s occurring now and that will be enabled by a broader National Broadband Network and a focus on what agencies do. Agencies will be required to use digital as the main channel with which they interact with their clients. There’s a Digital First road map that explains what people are going to do over the next few years to achieve that. Indeed it’s got considerable detail in it, so much so that I couldn’t fit it usefully onto a slide but again it’s useful to see what we’re going to do.