Chris Fechner, the head of the Digital Transformation Agency and concurrent head of the Australian Public Service’s Digital Profession unit, has laid out an impassioned plea for the survival of his organisation and its influencing role.
In a blog released in the wake of the Innovate Australia 2023 conference in Canberra, Fechner has laid out a valiant case to salvage and build on what digital positive progress has been made to date in the federal sphere after being given the mother of all hospital passes upon entering the job.
His comments also arrived ahead of the looming May federal Budget as the Albanese government considers its options to recast the national digital agenda.
As laudable as it is, Fechner’s lot resembles a gibbet to ambitious state reformists contemplating a move to Canberra to help the bureaucracy elevate itself from what the late Digital Transformation Office (DTO) chief Paul Shetler referred to as the “learned helplessness” of the APS on tech matters.
It’s not exactly a new theme. The late Defence secretary Allan Hawke made the same observation a decade before Shetler. Yet it burns like phosphorus.
To be fair to Fechner, he was sold an utter pup by Canberra. For the best of his intentions, the agency he was recruited to lead was utterly flayed by the Australian National Audit Office, which pretty well failed the DTA on every measure.
Make no mistake; this was a nuclear audit. Fechner was put in charge of Chernobyl, just not told it was on the verge of a meltdown. Congratulations, you’ve been promoted. The damage to the attraction of the federal brand, especially post robodebt, is hard to quantify, but it’s not good.
The results of Bill Shorten’s other inquiry, headed by former Finance chief Ian Watt, are not good. Few would question Watt’s eminence as a guardian of a good procurement process. Fewer his integrity.
The real question is whether this procurement governance orthodoxy has delivered reform or results, and the late Shetler as an APS outcast was an unapologetic sceptic: processes may work for an Auditor and lawyers, but this is of little effect if they fail the people. Paul died too soon.
Fechner’s latest take is realistic and practicable.
“In technology advancements, change cycles that previously took 5 to 10 years are now taking one year or, in some cases, a matter of months.
“Think about how quickly technology adapted to deliver what people and businesses needed during the pandemic. We need to make sure government service delivery continues to keep pace to meet these rapid cycles,” Fechner said.
“I believe a key challenge for government is to be responsive to this acceleration and change now and into the future. We should not be looking to the past, to the historical implementation of government.
“We need to change our mindset from spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating systems that are meant to last for decades, to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on hundreds of systems for hundreds of solutions that provide services to people who need them, when they need them, where they need them, at a cost that represents value to all people,” Fechner wrote in his blog.
More the pity that the APS explicitly rejected the creation of a distinct technology stream despite the clear recommendation of the Thodey review into the APS.
After two decades of outsourcing and pathetic co-dependency on consultants, competent technocrats are precisely what Canberra needs. Chris Fechner is one of them, even if the hand he was dealt was a shameful one.
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