Late in January, Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull created the “Digital Transformation Office”, designed to give a measure of coherence to various initiatives the minister has espoused since coming to office.
The DTO's heritage dates back to August 2013, just prior to the election, when Turnbull set forth his “Policy for E-Government and the Digital Economy”. Its main policy measures were:
- To work with the private sector on digital identity, digital mail, and government payment systems;
- Accelerate the rollout of “government 2.0”, with a focus on open data initiatives, online engagement, and departmental transparency;
- Cut down ICT duplication and fragmentation, with more shared services among small agencies;
- Promote whole-of-government ICT goals while acknowledging “the decentralised Australian Public Service and differences in scale and capabilities across agencies”.
A particular feature of the pre-election policy was that the government should look to model its interactions with citizens on UK initiatives. This would form the basis of a Digital Service Standard and Digital Design Guide – which we'll return to later.
The pre-election policy managed to squeeze in a couple of mandatory references to specific technologies – WebRTC, for example, got a mention – and the pre-ministerial Turnbull was very keen on replacing physical interaction with video-conferencing.
In digitising every interaction, there was also lip-service to every government site being platform-agnostic, to be equally accessible from PCs, laptops, phones and tablets.
Snail's Pace
Almost all of the policy has found itself moving at a snail’s pace since the government took office.
As an example, the Finance Department's beta of “Australia.gov.au” – its first shot unifying both the government portal and the user interface sites present – only went live in October 2014.
The Digital Transformation Office – announced in a press statement and detailed in a Q&A on Minister Turnbull's Website – can be seen as an effort to accelerate the process.
Minister Turnbull has sensibly kept whole-of-government IT integration away from the DTO, since that's an issue so thorny it will probably never be solved. The DTO's role focuses on the citizen interaction, service delivery and “digital transformation” parts of the original policy.
The politically-cynical might make three observations about the DTO: it's the part of Turnbull's strategy most likely to succeed; its activities don't undermine the prerogatives of the public service's most powerful agencies; and the whole thing is highly visible to citizens logging into government agency sites.
What could possibly go wrong?
The biggest problem I can see for the DTO is that the idea of a “single user interface” is, in itself, deeply flawed because it can straitjacket designers with the notion that all users are the same.
One example is searching for a company name or number at the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. Under the old paradigm on the old ASIC website, you would fill in a box like this on the home page:
The “single portal, since user experience, single design guide” puts more clicks between the user and the information they want – and with limited screen space and strict user interface policies, things can get forgotten. See if you can find ABN/ACN lookup from the Beta site's interface shown below:
If you're paying close attention you'll get taken to the Australian Business Register site, and notice this note in the corner.
Don't dismiss such issues as trivial: nearly every transition to “Gov.UK” has gone badly, and that country is Minister Turnbull's model for the DTO's activities.
For a critique of how the UK GDS – Government Digital Service – feels to users, there's this at the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-30524570
And for a big breakdown of delays and cost-overruns, The Register has this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/18/the_inside_story_of_govuk/
The good news, if there is any, is that the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Office has, at least, the UK experience as a dire warning.
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Quelle/Source: Axelera, 20.07.2015
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