In early August, Paul Shetler - the former head of Australia's Digital Transformation Office (now the Digital Transformation Agency) - shared some of his reflections on his time with the DTO and the UK's Government Digital Service before that.
You can read Stephen Easton's write-up of Shetler's remarks at the Mandarin, but for those of you who just want the key take-aways from a digital/service design and government perspective, here's my summary:
Key take-aways - design:
- Listen to the user, to user-facing departments and user-facing staff first and foremost.
- Innovation and improvement doesn't need to be radical or revolution!
- Agile, iterative and experimental digital projects are not the right approach for everything.
- Don't attempt the whiz-bang stuff until you've mastered the basics.
- In-source your core business, always.
Key take-aways - government:
- Accept that people mostly don't want to "engage" with government (and that's ok).
- Don't focus so much on your agency or organisational 'brand', presence and engagement above providing information and services that help users achieve their goals - those are your needs, not theirs.
- Government service delivery is not simple and not easy:
- it has crazy scale, reach and volume a lot of the time,
- uncertainty and regular change are par for the course,
- there are competing masters and will: political, senior public servants, and the public,
- the systems they operate - digital and otherwise - are often very complex
- they are subject to legislation, funding and constraints
- Governments often need to expend political capital to make meaningful change
- The tribal, competitive nature of public services (and senior public servants) may be able to be harnessed in some cases - you don't always have to force collaboration as the only method to achieve successful user outcomes.
Photo credit: Helloquence on Unsplash
