IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

There are no quick wins when it comes to improving public services — technology solutions often fail when the organisational and cultural change is lacking. But the private sector has shown that when data is used well and non-CIO executives become champions, it creates a better customer experience and increased productivity.

While there are “pockets of excellence” within the public sector when it comes to using data to improve customer experience, there is a lot to be learned from the private sector in the way it has done the necessary organisational reform required to back up technology change, says IBM’s Murray Bruce.

The NSW Commission of Audit is a group led by senior NSW bureaucrat Kerry Schott, and chaired by influential businessman David Gonski. It was put together by the current NSW Coalition Government after they took government at the last state election, with a view to developing an overarching framework for the future of the NSW public sector. Last week, the Commission produced a report into their examination of the sector (PDF). The NSW Government also published its response (PDF).

The PCEHR project was initially funded in the 2010 Federal Budget to the tune of $466.7 million after years of health industry and technology experts calling for development and national leadership in e-health and health identifier technology to better tie together patients’ records and achieve clinical outcomes. The project is overseen by the Department of Health in coalition with the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA).

Health minister, Tanya Plibersek, and communications minister, senator Stephen Conroy, said the $20.6m program would deliver services to patients in NBN rollout areas and provide feedback on how it and other health care measures could be delivered nationwide.

The funding is part of the Digital Careers program.

“Our children are digital natives. ICT is shaping every aspect of their lives – the way they connect, learn and play,” Minister for Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, said.

A number of factors, including widespread perceptions by students and their parents that ICT careers are insecure, poorly remunerated or boring, have driven tertiary enrolments in ICT courses down by over 50 percent. In 2010, the most recent year for which there is verifiable national data, 4,300 Australians obtained tertiary qualifications in ICT, down from 9,093 in 2003.¹ Advanced software developers, software engineers and data scientists are in particularly short supply.

Machine to machine (M2M) communications may have had a subdued year in Australia during 2011, but telco services provider Verizon Business is expecting big things of one of the underlying technologies of smart grids, smart homes and e-health in 2012.

Speaking to Computerworld Australia, area vice president, John Karabin, said upgrades to networks across the country during 2011 had laid a foundation of faster and more reliable connectivity with lower latencies.

Administered by the Australian Department of Finance, the suite of awards recognises and promotes excellence, innovation, and professionalism in the use of ICT. The Australian Government introduced the ICT Awards Program in 2006 to recognise the most outstanding initiatives in eGovernment and to promote excellence in the use of ICT across all Australian Government agencies (Federal, State & Territory, and Local).

The government hopes to hit 500,000 registrations by June 30 next year.

Department of Health and Ageing secretary Jane Halton said there had been more than 4000 registrations since the personally controlled e-health record system was launched on July 1.

Privacy concerns have long trumped efforts by Australian politicians to make better use of public data.

The NSW government’s Digital Plus strategy - under which NSW government is looking to appoint a whole-of-government ‘data broker’ to drive the use and exchange of public sector information across the state - suggests the tide is turning on that debate.

Dr Chris Mitchell, Head of Adoption, Benefits and Change at the National E-Health Transition Authority, says it is "really important that we prioritise rural Australia" for the roll out of ehealth initiatives and infrastructure such as the National Broadband Network which drives it.

AARNet has unveiled plans to connect hundreds of homes for the first time over the National Broadband Network as part of several research trials it has lined up across the country.

The connections will mark the first time the research internet service provider has directly served broadband to residents that are not staff or students of a university.

Its private network has typically been used to connect universities, research institutions and more recently TAFE colleges and some high schools with high-speed broadband.

Australia may not be a “laggard” in the digital space, but the DTO could be the best opportunity we have had in a long time to reset and re-imagine the business model of the digital age. The key to unlocking productivity growth and increasing global competitiveness rests in how the DTO pulls off its “start-up” approach.

The Australian Government recently announced the establishment of a Digital Transformation Office, to advance the national e-Government agenda. At the time, the Prime Minister and Communications Minister said the DTO would operate “more like a start-up”, bringing together developers, researchers and designers to put customer needs and user experience front and centre. The idea of public services being as well-designed and easy to use as AirBnB or goCatch sounds attractive, but just how feasible is it to create a digital start-up inside government?

New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia (capital: Sydney), encompasses 7.24 million citizens, or 32 percent of Australia’s total population. Healthcare IT leaders there are working on some very exciting initiatives these days. The state-managed health system, NSW Health, involves over 200 hospitals and clinics connected to a statewide vendor-neutral archive. What’s more, the broader architecture NSW Health created is this: a statewide enterprise imaging repository, as part of a statewide health information exchange (HIE) architecture.

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) and Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) have entered a joint agreement to strengthen ties between ICT professionals and educators.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) aims to keep ICT educators' and professionals' skills up-to-date with industry demands by providing members with recruitment assistance to CAUDIT members and access to ACS professional development programs.

Nudging Australian students toward ICT careers is a major goal of a new partnership between the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Australian Council of Deans of Information and Communications Technology (ACDICT).

The partnership aims to connect ICT educators with industry leaders to better attract and engage students to the profession. It “sets forth terms for an ongoing cooperative and collaborative partnership based on a joint interest to identify Australia’s workforce development needs and to deliver benefits to ICT higher education,” ACS said.

The Australian Capital Territory government will hand National ICT Australia (NICTA) $12 million in funding to further research and strengthen relationships between NICTA and ACT government agencies and the community of Canberra.

The funding, to be dispensed in $3 million lots per year over four years, will commence on 1 July 2012.

Launching the system, Assistant Minister for Defence, Stuart Robert said the demands of service life could at times lead to physical injury or mental illness.

"It is therefore essential that Defence's health services are at the cutting edge to ensure the provision of the best possible health care for our people," Mr Robert said.

Using a series of digital test beds.

The Australian Digital Health Agency is set to test new models of healthcare that are enabled or enhanced by the forthcoming personal e-health record.

The operator of the record system said it is looking to fund a series of test bed projects in partnership with industry and academia to feed into the creation of digitally-enabled services and new models of healthcare.

Donna Barton, a registered nurse working as a health informatics manager with a Sydney-based aged care provider, has recently attained the Certified Health Informatician Australasia (CHIA), which was co-developed by Australia’s health informatics bodies HISA, ACHI and HIMAA.