Overview
Governments across Australia are actively working to improve citizen experiences with simple, clear and fast digital services.
For the Federal Government, this means developing touchpoints which are responsive to policy changes, personalised around life events, and offer citizens the choice of when and how they want to engage with government.
The 2025 vision, presented in the Whole of Government Digital Transformation Strategy (the Strategy), is to be a “world- leader” in the delivery of digital services for the benefit of all Australians.
Achieving this vision will be a challenge. Old legacy systems and duplicated software contribute to complicated IT environments within many agencies
But with the growing deployment of cloud-based services, agencies are beginning to streamline their environments and become more agile and responsive to citizen needs, and less reliant on legacy systems besieged by high maintenance costs.
Cloud also creates an environment which allows agencies to better monitor the health and usage of software in real-time. Software intelligence solutions, which observe the cloud, are crucial to deliver great and consistent citizen experiences.
This paper demonstrates how end-to-end observability of cloud deployments can give agencies the intelligence needed to achieve the Federal Government’s three strategic priorities:
- To be easy to deal with
- Be informed by the citizen
- Be fit for the digital age
Government that’s easy to deal with
— Citizens will have the option to access all services online, optimised around touchpoints via life journey mapping.
Government structures can be inherently complex. Australia’s three levels of government (Federal, State / Territory and Local), and the devolved responsibilities for service provision, have resulted in various touchpoints with inconsistent levels of citizen experience.
The Federal Government is leading cross-jurisdictional work to streamline services around life events. The Australian Data and Digital Council has three life journey projects: Queensland is leading the Looking for work project; NSW and Federal are collaborating on mapping an End of life journey; and the ACT and Federal are looking at Birth of a child, with assistance from NSW and Queensland investigating Digital Birth certificates.
With life journey mapping, governments aim to identify then streamline the various touchpoints and improve citizen experience by creating a clear and consistent offering for services available on the device of their choice. For agencies with multiple business systems on public, private and hybrid clouds, end-to-end user journey observability is needed so that citizen experience improvements can be made, and citizens receive the best service possible.
Government that’s informed by the citizen
— Leverage citizen data to personalise services and inform policy, retaining auditability and citizen trust.
The ability to adapt in real-time to personalise services has historically been a sticking point of bureaucratic systems. Adjusting for the micro-factors that add to the complexity of real people’s lives is necessary to create a personalised, seamless experience for citizens. Positive micro-interactions with government, such as digital service delivery experience, can be a driver of citizen trust. Personalised services not only offer convenience, but guide and assist those in society needing more help.
Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible
AI enables the processing of growing volumes of data easier and enables personalised decisions for a citizen to be made, which would otherwise be beyond human capabilities.
AI also makes it possible to find anomalies, and adjust and make improvements in real-time. This is sometimes known as Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, or AIOps, in which back-end systems management happens on its own, ensuring the user is given the best possible experience when interacting with digital services on any device.
Government that’s fit for the Digital Age
— Greater adoption of common platforms and maturity of Australian Public Service digital skills, along with more sophisticated collaboration with organisations outside government.
The development of common platforms is central to the Federal Government’s approach to improve service delivery. The Whole of Government platforms implemented by the Digital Transformation Agency include Digital Identity, Tell Us Once, Notifications and Payments. Software intelligence is needed to observe the performance of these platforms to ensure that citizen experience can be optimised.
The Strategy emphasises developing greater collaboration between agencies and external parties, including community organisations, universities and the private sector using technology-enabled platforms. This will add to the complexity and scope for governments to manage their secure business systems.
Additionally, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) of these services gives actionable insights to retain user satisfaction and measurable outcomes of these government services. With a greater number and diversity of users, the government will be under added pressure to ensure optimal system performance to deliver those outcomes.
The trend towards self-healing systems is increasing amongst organisations. This way of operating reduces the number of personnel associated with managing an application, and can resolve issues well before they would have been identified previously. With IT skills shortages and the maintenance of the Average Staffing Level cap for Federal Government agencies, automation of application management will allow agencies to focus resources on the ambitious 2025 Vision of providing “world-leading” digital services.
Find out more and read our blog post "What is digital experience"
Government that's
- Easy to deal with
- Informed by the citizen
- Fit for the Digital Age
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