Isn’t it time to join up central government systems with local government?
Australia has been a dynamo of digital announcements over the past month, but what’s most radical is how it offering its services across central and local government.
This move is a new approach for digital services - dubbed ‘Government as a Platform’ - and is set to become an important trend in e-government.
In practice, it means that central government is responsible for procuring a system which is available across the whole public sector. This ensures that government can use its bulk-buying powers to bring down cost, and its expertise to ensure that a system always meets the latest security and accessibility standards. Meanwhile, users can get a uniform digital experience from every single agency.
The Australian federal government has announced plans to use this approach on two products: its MyGov identity assurance platform, and its GovCMS web hosting scheme.
MyGov provides a secure log-in for citizens to transact with central government, for example when paying taxes online.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced last month that the government’s new Digital Transformation Office - a centralised e-government unit - will make the MyGov platform “available to all local and state government for no charge from the Commonwealth.” Further, it will work with state and local governments on a “digital mailbox and a digital identity platform”.
“The DTO has been established so that agencies can adopt a coordinated, whole -of-government approach to service delivery, moving beyond the current model of agencies operating in silos,” Turnbull said.
The GovCMS platform is also available across the public sector. Under this scheme, agencies big and small can sign up with the federal Ministry of Finance for a package that includes a standard (open source) content management system and web site. They can even source a full redesign, development and implementation of their website from the centrally approved supplier.
The advantage of this approach is that it provides full compliance to Australian standards and is secure. It also allows agencies to focus on the front-end stuff: content, responding to user feedback, delivering services; while the experts deliver the complex backend side.
Under the GovCMS scheme, agencies manage user accounts, content, respond to FOI requests, meet privacy requirements, moderate blogs and comments, and classify their documents.
Meanwhile, the federal government and its supplier, Acquia, offers support, monitoring and security patching.
Government as a Platform is also being examined elsewhere. The UK’s government digital service has expressed the ambition to start providing services, support and platforms to local government. Already, the GDS has mandated all central government departments to migrate onto the same web platform - Gov.UK - and shut individual web sites in the process.
Australia isn’t mandating anyone to choose its CMS option. I spoke to Chief Technology Officer John Sheridan last year, who explained that: ““This will be a choice that [agencies] will have, we’re not mandating the use of Drupal,” although “a lot of them do want to take advantage of this arrangement so we’re making it possible for them to do so.”
This is because “we have a devolved framework here”. But their move is broader than the UK’s, because that CMS is only available for central government.
Government as a platform is an important trend in digital public services. It joins up systems, saves money, provides a uniform experience to citizens, and allows government to focus on making one system secure - rather than splitting efforts across a number of different systems.
Of course, the flip side is that if a weakness is found in one system, it compromises an awfully large number of websites. A huge bug was found in the Drupal system powering GovCMS just last year. And some agencies may prefer their current systems and suppliers, especially if they’re supporting local industry.
Mike Bracken, the head of the UK’s Government Digital Service, has been setting out plans for the UK to start offering a Government as a Platform service to local governments (see the video at the bottom).
Australia’s DTO was actually inspired by the GDS, both in its structure and in the work it’s doing. But it’s work on MyGov and GovCMS are now leapfrogging the UK and offer an indication of things to come.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Joshua Chambers
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 16.03.2015
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