Speech to the Australian Government Libraries Information Network

Good morning, it’s a great pleasure to be here to speak at the Australian Government Libraries Information Network Conference: “Change, challenges and opportunities”.

In the information age the role of librarians and information managers is more important than ever.

I had the experience recently of trying to explain to one of the young Liberals in my office – who’s aged maybe 22 – how the closed reserve system used to work. I explained when I was studying Economics 1, and 900 other people were studying Economics 1 – and the lecturer would assign an essay with one of the references being the Budget papers, and there were only five copies of the Budget papers for 900 people and you could only access them for 2 hours.

He just could not grasp the concept that information was finite and limited, because all of his life experience has been of living in a world of super-abundance of information, as opposed to scarcity of information.

This led me to reflect on the remarkable change we have experienced in in last 30 years.

The amount of data generated in the world in 2013 was approximately 4.4 zettabytes – about 33 times the data generated in 2005.

But of course the new challenge is making sense of that enormous volume – and accessing the information that the end user wants. And so I wasn’t surprised to see that among the issues AGLIN directly addresses in its objectives as an organisation include :

- To promote cost-effective and efficient information services to Australian Government organisations; and

- To promote improved access to information by Australian Government organisations and their staff;

And that is an enormous challenge when there is simply so much information out there.

I recently had the opportunity to launch the Australian National Archives Audio-Visual Archive Management System, ‘AVAMS’, their new system to store and retrieve audiovisual records – such as the entire catalogue of ABC Four Corners episodes going back 40 years – and that’s a good insight into the practicalities of the task of cataloguing and retrieving information.

Now I’m confident there’s one thing that, for this audience, would cause your teeth to grate would be to say, ‘well what’s the problem when you can just search Google?’

These issues are central to your work – and they are highly relevant to the challenges the government faces in a world where digital technology is transforming every sector.

Today I want to talk about our approach to the digital transformation of government and make three key points. First, that digital transformation is a huge opportunity to serve citizens better. Second, that we are not doing as well as we should. And thirdly, that the Abbott Government has a plan to change that and I’ll talk about what we are doing.

It is a huge opportunity to serve citizens better.

Let’s start with the proposition that transformation through digital technology offers a huge opportunity to serve citizens better.

I think we should start by looking at how the private sector has used digital to serve customers better. Over the past twenty years or so, there has been a continuing focus by business on how best to serve customers using digital technology.

Just think for a moment about how much better the user experience has become as an airline passenger.

Once, you had to make a booking in the office of a travel agent, and you would be issued with paper-based tickets which could take days to be processed and sent to you.

Today we expect to be able to book flights and hotels online from any device, anywhere, anytime; and have confirmation arrive via email instantly. Increasingly, the entire process is paperless, with the boarding pass sent to your smartphone.

The service experience today, compared to twenty years ago, is phenomenally improved.

The same could be said about banking, about buying books or clothes or music, about sector after sector.

It Delivers Big Benefits to End Users

I hardly need to tell a group of librarians about the end user benefits of digital technology.

Digital catalogues are accessible anywhere, we have the ability to retrieve the full text of items – not just the catalogue entry online, there is no more waiting for items to be retrieved from stacks or getting your hands on the key article from closed reserve.

The Chief Technology Officer for the UK Government, Liam Maxwell, visited Australia last year to share the UK experience in using digital technology to transform government. 

As head of the UK’s ‘Government Digital Service’ initiative, Maxwell is charged with reshaping the UK Government’s service delivery platform to align with user expectations.

The question Liam Maxwell asks of each government platform is this: “What is the user need?”

It sounds perfectly straightforward, but for governments around the world, the user need is all too often an afterthought when it comes to delivering services to citizens.

It Delivers Savings & Efficiencies to Government

A recent Deloitte Access Economics report, ‘Digital government transformation’ found that online transactions are more than 16 times cheaper than transactions over the phone, 30 times cheaper than postal transactions and a staggering 50 times cheaper than face-to-face transactions[1].

So if we can increase the proportion of transactions citizens conduct online there are significant financial benefits.  That being said, it is a mistake for government to make the case for digital services in terms of benefits to government.  (This I think is a lesson from the attempted introduction of the Australia Card in the eighties – it was framed almost exclusively in terms of the benefits to government.)

Pervasiveness of digital infrastructure

A further reason why there is a big opportunity here is because of the pervasiveness of the infrastructure.

With each passing year the size of the digital opportunity for government becomes greater – as Australians enthusiastically adopt technology.

With smartphones and tablets offering low-cost, instant access to services such as banking and airline bookings, the opportunity for government to shift service delivery to mobile platforms has the potential to deliver improved outcomes for end-users and significant savings for governments.

We have high levels of smartphone and tablet penetration.

Today, 56 per cent of Australians own a tablet device and 72 per cent own a smart phone according to the latest Sensis e-Business report[2].

According to the 2014 Deloitte Mobile Consumer Survey, 46 per cent of Australians check their smartphone within 15 minutes of waking up – and amongst 18-24 year olds it is 75 per cent.

We are not doing as well as we should

Unfortunately, while private sector operators and their customers have embraced online service delivery, governments have not done such a good job of transforming the way that we deliver services to citizens.

The Deloitte Access Economics report I cited earlier states that there are currently 320 million Australian government transactions conducted via face-to-face, telephone and post each year – almost 40 per cent of the total figure. If even half of these transactions were conducted online, there is room for a potential digital productivity and efficiency saving of $1.7 billion annually.

But despite the potential savings and the raft of consumer benefits on offer, there is still much work to be done in Government when it comes to online service delivery.

A recent report by Boston Consulting Group titled ‘Digital Government: Turning Rhetoric Into Reality’ summarised government progress as:

“Getting better – but still plenty of room for improvement: that’s the current assessment by everyday users of their governments’ efforts to deliver online services… Many citizens – accustomed to innovation in such sectors as retailing, media, and financial services – wish their Governments would get on with it.”

The Commission of Audit, which reported in 2014, noted that as recently as 2012, 50 percent of the services provided by the Department of Human Services were not conducted online. The ATO was still sending out 10 million notices a year in hardcopy, and a further 17 million letters each year on activity statement material. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection maintains a significant proportion of visa categories which are not electronic.[3]

The report made it clear that Government needed to take action to improve the situation, calling for a “transformative strategy to become digital by default for all transactions… It should act decisively to remove legislative barriers to digital transactions.”

In many areas there has been solid progress. For example, myGov provides a central account linked to the Taxation Office, Medicare, Centrelink, Child Support, the Department of Health, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the National Disability Insurance Agency services. The site now has more than 7.5 million accounts registered.

But there is much yet to be done, and Australians are clamouring for more. Recent research indicates that over 80 per cent of Australians expect to be able to deal with government online.

The slow pace of change within Government can be a blocker to greater uptake of service delivery online.

In the private sector, the uptake of digital technologies has been heavily driven by disruptive new entrants using new technologies. Encylopedia Britannica did not adopt a digital model; it was disrupted by Wikipedia.  Fairfax tried to hold onto the rivers of gold in classified advertising; it was disrupted by new players with digital models such as Seek and RealEstate.com.au.

Of course as librarians and information professionals you are very familiar with the concept of disruption, as commentators on your sector point out.  According to a recent article by ANU Librarian Colin Steel:

“In the electronic environment libraries need to recognise that increasingly they are not the only game in town. Twenty four hour online bookshops can provide reference services as well as information to the global information user. Superbookstores have in some ways replaced public libraries for the more affluent of our citizens. Academics can order books online and can access information via subject gateways.”[4]

The problem with governments is that they are a monopoly. There is no way for a disruptive new entrant to come in and change the way the government industry operates.

That means we have to disrupt ourselves!

The Abbott Government’s plan to change that

To capitalise on the opportunity provided by moving services online, the Coalition took a policy of ‘Convenient Service Anytime Anywhere’ to the 2013 election.

The benefits, as we have seen from the work done in the UK, will be a better service experience for citizens, as well as being more cost effective for Government.

Digital Transformation Office

Recently we announced the creation of the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) which reports to Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The DTO will be an executive agency in the Communications portfolio; it will comprise a small team of developers, designers, researchers and content specialists working across government to develop and coordinate the delivery of digital services.

It is designed to address the reality that some government agencies have made good progress in digitising services that could once only be accessed over the counter or over the phone – but the level of progress from one agency to another is inconsistent.

The DTO will have a very strong focus on end-user needs in developing digital services.

By designing digital services that are consistent and simple to use, fewer people will need to come into a shopfront or make a phone call.

As Minister Turnbull recently said about the work of the DTO:

“This is going to ensure that government services are vastly more compelling, vastly more attractive to citizens, and of course it will save them time and money.”

The DTO will work closely with State and Territory Governments to identify opportunities for collaboration, including ways to make better use of a common digital identity or online credential across different tiers of government, between MyGov federally and state-level online service portals.

To improve the experience for users interacting on both between state and federal service portals, the DTO will make access to a common digital identity available to all state, territory and local governments at no charge, other than any associated on-boarding costs.

This is important because many services are delivered by state governments not federal – and hence improving digital service delivery by state governments is key to an improved citizen experience.

Consider the task of renewing your car’s registration.  Once you would once have had to travel to the local motor registry, taken a number, waited in line, filled in paper-based forms and completed a payment in-person at a counter.

It was a time-consuming and often frustrating experience for customers, and it is no surprise that people have embraced online registration renewals offered by the NSW Government.

This user experience can be improved even further by a common digital identity which will allow users to move seamlessly between state and commonwealth online service portals, without the need to remember a list of usernames, passwords and security questions.

Recently we appointed Paul Shetler as CEO of the Digital Transformation Office.

He has come from the United Kingdom where he was an executive in the Government Digital Service and the Chief Digital Officer for the UK Ministry of Justice – and part of the overall push led by Liam Maxwell which I talked about earlier.

During his time in the UK he made it easier for citizens to access applications for civil claims, book prison visits and fill out power of attorney applications. 

Paul Shetler has now commenced work as CEO of the Digital Transformation Office, and early priorities for the office include establishing this single digital identity and the development of a digital service standard to give a consistent experience across government agencies.

Speaking about his new role, Shetler said that Australia offered “the best opportunity in digital across the world” because the DTO has been positioned to work with and work across all tiers of government.

He said, “We have an opportunity to actually provide digital government as government, not digital government as state government or municipal government or this agency or that agency.”

Shetler sees the DTO’s primary role as “focussing relentlessly on the needs of the actual users,” saying that government online service delivery projects “tend to fail because the government is thinking about its own needs, rather than the needs of the people who use it.”

Looking at the various siloed departmental projects across government, Shetler says the DTO’s job “is to clean that up, make them simpler, more humane, more effective, and at the end of the day, also cheaper.”

Just last month the DTO embarked on a national recruitment drive to accelerate the pace of digital transformation across the Australian Government. Under the campaign, the DTO will recruit around 20 developers and designers, researchers and product managers to help deliver innovative new online government services.

Make Government Data Available

Government adoption of open data policies has led to a flourishing of new service broker apps.  One of my personal favourites is TripView. This handy smartphone app uses open data on public transport services to provide users with real-time information on bus, train and ferry timetables. 

Make the data available and see what smart people can do with it – to benefit end users.

One model is the use of third party service brokers.

The concept of using service brokers is not new – tax agents assist citizens in completing and filing tax returns; community organisations assist jobseekers to find work utilising government-funded employment programmes.

Until recently my wife and I had a child in childcare, and navigated the complexity of all the government forms involved – which is why another third-party service broker captured my attention. HubCare is an Australian company which provides a technology platform to connect child-care service providers, end users and the relevant government departments which fund and regulate these services.

From the end-user’s perspective, in this case the parent or guardian of the child, the platform enables them to easily manage payments, government subsidies and information about their child such as allergies and medications.

For the provider, the platform simplifies the processes involved with dealing with multiple government departments, and for the government it means the complex process of establishing a technology platform has effectively been outsourced, alleviating the need for departments to do everything themselves.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by saying that digital transformation is affecting every sector and every industry. Your profession is certainly experiencing that transformation – including the challenges to the way that you have traditionally operated, and the opportunities the technology provides to perform your function much more effectively.

Similarly across government more broadly, we want to leverage the power of digital to deliver better services to citizens.  We hope in due course to change the perceptions of citizens – so that rather than government being seen as hard to deal with and well behind the private sector, it is seen as doing as good a job as business in providing a better service experience using technology.  If we achieve that outcome, we will have done something very worthwhile for citizens.

[1] Deloitte Access Economics report, ‘Digital government transformation’ p23

[2] Sensis e-Business Report 2015 p7

[3] The Report of the National Commission of Audit, Phase One, p238

[4] “Staffing the Digital Library in the 21st Century” http://anulib.anu.edu.au/about/steele/digital_library.html