The role of digital and data in government has been steadily escalating for some time. Yet its adoption has accelerated to warp speed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Technology has allowed workers to continue working from home, and government digital applications and systems have responded at a rapid pace.
Is this acceleration of new digital government services a precedent for how public sector CIOs and their IT teams will respond in the future? Lalit Guglani, Managing Director of Digital & Technology Advisory at Synergy Group, explains how technology has proven its value in this time of crisis and now needs a seat at the strategic planning table.
Technology: friend and foe
Technology has certainly come to the rescue to support our need to work from home during the pandemic. The Australian Government has deployed and expanded its application of digital and data services with unprecedented speed and scale. Overall, it was an admirable success. Agencies have come together to work together across government and industry to accelerate technology deployment – with results achieved in weeks, whereas traditionally it took months.
“However, some of these rapid implementations have exposed some weaknesses and vulnerabilities in scalability, design, usability and trust in government digital services,” says Lalit. “The MyGov site crashed under heavy load due to scalability issues – the underlying infrastructure was simply not designed to handle such a massive increase in use by welfare claimants. This crisis highlighted the importance of planning and provided a real use case to consider when designing digital services in the future.”
Still, Lalit was impressed with the speed with which the CovidSafe app was rolled out despite some issues. “In my personal opinion, the government has risen to this sudden, unprecedented challenge. It showed how government can smartly use digital and data for the public good.
Although Lalit states that this comes with caution: “I hope the momentum will continue well beyond the pandemic, but that requires bold IT leadership, top-level sponsorship, agile approaches and greater collaboration across government and industry.
A new perspective on technology design
Lalit says agencies need to strengthen their enterprise design/architecture capabilities to make digital and data an integral part of government strategic planning.
“The pandemic has shown how a united government can come together and work with industry to deliver digital services,” says Lalit. “Obviously this requires commitment and leadership support, but as the old saying goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. The CovidSafe contact tracing app, the coronavirus information app, telehealth and various local government digital initiatives are some examples.
“At the same time, it revealed certain limitations in existing approaches to technology design, which do not always sufficiently consider flexibility, usability, connectivity and security. He also emphasized again the deficit of trust in the government.
Lalit hopes this latest experience will inspire CIOs and agency managers to build (or rebuild) an enterprise design/architecture capability. The intent of this capability is to ensure that technology design is business oriented, modular, reusable and clearly traceable to business outcome.
“Bold IT leadership, top-level sponsorship, agile approaches and greater collaboration across government and industry are key to digital acceleration.”
– Lalit Guglani, CEO, Synergy Group
Digital “master plan”
“We need to reinvigorate the disciplines of enterprise architecture and enterprise design,” explains Lalit. “The concept architecture is similar to a ‘master plan’ for the city that provides a longer-term vision of the agency’s technology and digital capabilities and articulates how those capabilities are interconnected and enable the agency’s business goals.”
“Some of these digital capabilities could be developed in-house, some could be shared with other agencies and others could be outsourced ‘as a service’. If such an enterprise design approach is adopted across government, then each individual agency’s ‘master plan’ can be aggregated to provide a whole-of-government view of the Australian Government’s digital capabilities.”
Although it seems like a big task and some may be skeptical because it has been tried before, Lalit believes that this architectural discipline is now much more advanced than it used to be. “Without a master plan, it is difficult, if not impossible, for agencies to be sure that they are duplicating a capability that is already available elsewhere, and that the new capability will continue to work in concert with the interconnected parts.”
“How do they know what other services or features the new capability might need to connect or collaborate? How will they determine which security features are required and which are available? What are the supply chain dependencies in the event of a breach? And importantly, how does that capability relate to the agency’s business and goals?’
Act as a trading firm
Lalit’s recommendation is that agency IT operations need to be set up as if they were a commercial enterprise.
“IT needs to be seen as a core business with a seat at the table when it comes to funding and business decisions,” says Lalit. “IT teams must be sustainable in terms of funding, workforce and quality of service. This means good governance, a strong client service ethic and rigorous costing methods. It also means a greater need to focus on vendor management due to the increased use of secure cloud services.”
Technology is undoubtedly more friend than foe in supporting government services. “We need technology to be applied in a smart and integrated way for better government services, designed with a human-centric approach and for long-term sustainability,” says Lalit.