Speech to the Fujitsu World Tour

It is pleasure to be with you to speak at the Fujitsu world tour here in Melbourne – on the theme of ‘human centric innovation.’

This is of course enormously important for business – in every imaginable industry. 

Such innovation depends upon a foundation of technology – technology which is digitally transforming every aspect of our economy and society.

But the theme of ‘human centric innovation’ nicely captures a central reality of the technological innovation we are seeing – the endlessly imaginative ways in which technology is being applied to better serve the needs and solve the problems of people everywhere.

Everyone in this room will have their own experiences of thinking, ‘what a fantastic idea’ as you learn about a particular new application or website or IT system or device or software tool or technology.  I am sure there are people in this room who have had the fantastic idea themselves, in the shower or driving to work, and a week or a year or a decade later it is a mass market application. 

Certainly as a Parliamentarian working on public policy in the communications and information technology sectors, I am constantly amazed by what I see.

Let me offer a few recent examples.

On a recent visit to the University of Wollongong’s SMART infrastructure facility, I learned about their Peta Jakarta project – using Twitter to collect and disseminate information about flooding in Jakarta.

Indonesia has one of the highest usage rates of Twitter in the world, and the ‘Peta Jakarta’ platform allows residents to share information about local floods via Twitter using their geo-location enabled mobile devices, which the system then maps online so other residents can plan their movement around the city accordingly.

This example demonstrates several themes – crowdsourcing data from large numbers of people and aggregating that into robust and useable information; delivering that information over the internet and particularly internet-enabled mobile devices; and the affordability and ubiquity of today’s digital infrastructure so that it is every bit as relevant in less wealthy countries as it is in countries like Australia.

Last year I attended the Australian final of Google’s Global Impact Challenge, and many of these same themes were on display in the winning projects. 

As Google describes the process:

Australian non-profits shared their ideas for a better world. Your vote and our panel of judges determined the winners. Four non-profits each received a $500,000 grant to realise their vision. Six additional finalists each received $250,000 to get their projects up and running.

InfoXchange demonstrated a program to connect Australia's homeless with social services, aiming to deliver $3 million in savings for service providers which can be invested back into service delivery.

The Asthma Foundation NSW has a project to use a sensor network to gather real-time data on air quality, which is then made accessible through a smartphone app - allowing people with asthma to be prepared for problematic air conditions.

Another strong theme is the way that digital technology is reshaping sectors such as financial services, and allowing more convenient services to be delivered to customers.

I recently met with Visa executives who briefed me on Australia’s world-leading adoption of paywave technology – delivering great convenience to consumers who can make a payment of up to $100 without having to key in a PIN, simply by waving a card over a reader. They also spoke of the increasing trend towards using mobile devices to make payments rather than physically presenting the traditional plastic credit card.

Last week I visited Telstra’s muru-D accelerator for technology sector start-ups in Sydney. There were some amazing business ideas, such as a company called Disrupt who describe their mission as

to help you create and share your own customized surfboard. You tell us all about yourself, your ability and what you're trying to achieve with your surfing. We use 3D printing design technology to make a digital set up of your board, you direct the art, finish and design and we finish the rest.

What could be more human-centric than using the power of the internet to deliver an affordable customised surfboard to help a surfer get more out of his or her surfing experience?

It is also authentically Australian – and another authentically Australian application is Sense-T, an initiative led by the University of Tasmania & CSIRO.  This project uses sensor technology to gather data on things like water levels, temperature, soil moisture and so on.

The data is aggregated in the cloud and made available online so participating farmers, viticulturalists, oyster farmers and others can manage their businesses more efficiently.  Over 30 farms in Tasmania are participating – and one of the most striking and memorable applications is sensors to monitor the heartbeat of oysters.

Sense-T is a good example of something highlighted in Fujitsu’s Technology and Service Vision paper: the world is becoming ‘hyperconnected’. There are well over ten billion connected mobile devices being used today, including smartphones, tablets, gaming devices, wearables, sensors, and more; and we are on track to having 50 billion connected services in the ‘internet of things’ by 2020.

All of these devices will be generating unprecedented amounts of data – 44 zettabytes by 2020, a ten-fold increase on 2013, according to IDC[1].

At the centre of this maelstrom of new devices and data will be the user.

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.

Unfortunately, governments have not done such a good job of transforming the way that we deliver services to citizens.

According to a recent paper from Boston Consulting Group Paper, governments around the world are:

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.[2]

That assessment is as valid for Australia as for all the other countries BCG surveyed.

The Commission of Audit, which reported early last year, notes that in 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.

In some areas there has been solid progress. For example, myGov provides a central account linked to 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 six million users.

Some other areas of progress have been online tax returns, the processing of many visas electronically, and electronic cargo manifests.

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.[3]

So the Abbott Government is working to make digital service delivery a priority.

If we talk about human-centric innovation, there are 23 million humans in Australia, and almost all of them deal with the federal government.  It might be paying tax, or obtaining social services such as the age pension or Newstart allowance, applying for a government grant, receiving a HELP loan to study at university, obtaining a passport – the list goes on and on.

If we can make this process more efficient and customer-friendly through digital service delivery – that will deliver material benefits for Australians.

The Coalition took a policy of ‘Convenient Service Anytime Anywhere’ to the 2013 election.

This policy was, in part, inspired by the UK Government’s initiative where experience has shown that online transactions are 20 times cheaper than transactions over the phone, 30 times cheaper than postal transactions and a staggering 50 times cheaper than face-to-face transactions.

The UK Government estimates that moving to online channels for transactional services is likely to cut the cost of service delivery by one fifth.

The Coalition’s goal is that by the end of 2017 all major services and interactions will be available to the public online, making government more accessible and more efficient.

A very important milestone in implementing our plan is the recently announced creation of the Digital Transformation Office (DTO.)

From 1 July 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.

One of its first tasks will be relieving people of the need to complete separate log on processes for each government service. Instead, people should have an opt in ‘digital identity’, which they can use to log in to each of their services across the government.             

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.[4]

He went on to point out the bigger picture of why such a transformation in the digital delivery of government services is so important:

This is going to revolutionise the way government services are delivered. It is going to make government more efficient. It is going to drive our national target of productivity, competitiveness and innovation that will deliver us the growth and ensure our children's jobs in the years to come.[5]

The DTO will also work closely with State and Territory Governments to identify opportunities for collaboration, including ways to make better use of myGov.

State governments have also made promising moves to online service delivery. To renew your car’s registration, 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.

The Baird government in NSW is building momentum behind digital service delivery, now moving all of its services to a single online portal, ‘service.nsw.gov.au’. Its physical presence is replicating the single-online-portal model, shifting from multiple shopfronts to all-in-one ‘Service NSW’ centres where citizens can do anything from renewing licences to registering births.

The cost of bringing a state government agency onboard to myGov will be low – as low as $50,000 – and so Minister Turnbull has said that the federal government is going to make this platform available to state and local government at no charge from the commonwealth.

Another option open to both government and private-sector operators 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.

More recently, 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. 

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.

Let me conclude by highlighting three key principles that we aim to use in government in our own approach to human-centric innovation.

First, we have a clear focus on the end user or citizen benefits. Yes, there are potentially big benefits to Governments, for example in cost savings, but to get take-up of these services we need to deliver benefits to end users.

Second, we are working to take an open data and big data approach. Government holds a lot of datasets and by making these available online to all who want to access them, new ways will be found to capture value from the data.

One good example of the benefits this can bring comes from Canada, where a researcher obtained data on charities from the Canadian tax office – and discovered a significant number of illegally operating charities, with total fraudulent donations of over one billion Canadian dollars a year. Had the tax office published these data sets online each year, the fraud would likely have been discovered much earlier.  The TripView app I mentioned earlier is another example of the benefits of an open data approach.

Third, we aim to bring some of the culture of digital start up companies to the Digital Transformation Office.  If we are successful one indication of this will be the number of people with private sector digital experience who join the team; another will be an approach of getting new applications out quickly, with an aim of delivering quick wins, rather than the more traditional approach of a giant IT project which is built in totality before anything is delivered and is usable by customers.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in extraordinary times where technology is advancing relentlessly.  We are seeing greatly increased and much cheaper processing power; the rise and rise of mobile networks and devices; and the explosion of data as part of the internet of things.

The technology is one thing – how we use it to live better lives is another.

There is an extraordinary amount of energy and creativity going into this – in business, in not for profits, and in government.

For so many of you in the room today, this is your life’s work.

Congratulations on all you do and congratulations to Fujitsu on hosting this very important forum.

[1] Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision 2015, p6

[2] Boston Consulting Group, Digital Government: Turning the rhetoric into reality.

[3] ACMA’s Communications Report (2012-13), p. 124

[4] http://www.openaustralia.org.au/debates/?id=2015-02-10.70.1

[5] Ibid.