It was with relatively little fanfare that the federal government released the draft Data and Digital Government Strategy: The data and digital vision for a world-leading APS to 2030 alongside the Budget.
The strategy deserves attention, however. It does not overstate the case when it says that data and digital technologies are increasingly critical to the Australian government’s activities.
The strategy lands in the context of increasing societal expectations of a seamless user experience when interacting with government services, evolving standards for what constitutes appropriate and proportional data use, and emerging cyber security threats.
These themes are present in the vision for the strategy: “The Australian Government will deliver simple, secure and connected public services for all people and business through world-class data and digital capabilities.”
While it is Australia’s first combined data and digital strategy, its antecedents are the Australian Data Strategy and the Digital Government Strategy – both released by the Morrison government in December 2021.
The 2021 Australian Data Strategy was not so much a strategy as a white paper. It provided a thorough background into the importance of data for the Australian economy and society, and a detailed list of government data-related initiatives (including policy and legislation developments) that contribute to the vision to become a modern data-driven society by 2030.
The 2021 Digital Government Strategy had an aggressive vision, which was for Australia to “be one of the top 3 digital governments in the world by 2025”.
In the new strategy, however, timelines are conspicuously absent. The high-level vision is set for 2030. The goals of the Digital Government Strategy for making all government services available digitally and giving Australians the ability to complete all government interactions from consistent points of access by 2025 are gone.
Cyber security is a critical and related topic to data and digital government. While the 2023-2030 Australian Cyber Security Strategy is currently in development, the discussion paper for the strategy outlines its ambitious aim for Australia to become the most cyber-secure nation by 2030.
There are inter-dependencies for delivering on the visions for both the strategy and the upcoming Cyber Security Strategy, such as the need to develop the necessary workforce and skills pipeline, and for secure development of public-public and public-private data sharing arrangements.
The APS is certainly a big ship to (digitally speaking) turn around. The digital transformation of the APS has proven to be challenging – there is history here. A senate committee report published in 2018 scathingly observed that “digital transformation is a policy area beset by soaring rhetoric and vague aspirations by government, largely unconnected to the actual policy activities actually undertaken”.
The 2025 goals from the Morrison government in the Digital Government Strategy certainly seem — from our current vantage point in mid-2023 — like soaring rhetoric that is disconnected from current reality in the APS.
The new strategy is a more restrained document. While it is stripped of the measurable and highly aspirational goals of the Digital Government Strategy, there doesn’t appear to be significant new content that wasn’t included in its precursors — rather it is largely a repackaged vision.
One notable exception is the new reference to a digital ID framework that will, according to the strategy, enable simpler and safer ways for people to access public services.
National ID schemes, of course, have a long history of failures in Australia. It is also true that they play a core role in the successful digital government services of Estonia, the country generally ranked No.1 for digital government.
While not substantially new, the strategy is, however, a sensible repackaging of the previously separate data and digital government strategies. It synthesises and articulates the critical elements that need to be in place to deliver against the vision.
The accompanying implementation plan (yet to be developed) will be where the size of the gap between aspirations and the ability to make them a reality will become apparent.
It will require strong political will to tackle the long-standing and systemic problems within the APS – the problems which result in symptoms, referenced in the strategy, such as “lingering outdated technology” and “competing priorities”.
Other symptoms include the acknowledged skills shortages in data, ICT and digital solutions, and the lack of innovation in the APS (although this is only hinted at).
These symptoms are not, at their core, technology or data issues. Rather, they are cultural issues.
Speak to almost any senior data leader — across the public and private sectors — about the challenges they face in assisting organisations to become data-driven, and they will speak about issues stemming from sub-optimal organisational cultures.
Dr Lesley Seebeck’s comments on digital transformation are descriptive of the culture in and around the APS: “The federal government seems stalled, with frustration evident amongst ministers, a well-fed and buoyant consulting industry and a weary resentment within a starved public service.”
So, what needs to be done in the implementation phase to steer this troubled digital ship in the right direction? It is a complex topic, and reductionist, simplistic solutions are not going to be effective.
Australians are, anecdotally, a risk-averse bunch. Certainly, Australian organisations have been slower to adopt AI technology than other countries in developed markets, as Stela Solar, the director of the National AI Centre, points out.
The APS takes conservatism and risk aversion to another level, and there are layers of structure and incentives that continually reinforce this conservatism. Asking the APS to foster a culture of innovation and experimentation, and to be flexible and responsive, as the strategy does, is like asking a wombat to be a fast swimmer. It’s just not built that way.
Shifting the culture of the APS requires strong leadership. A culture of safety needs to be developed, where failures are accepted as a part of learning, and risks can be taken in the knowledge that the appropriate risk management boundaries and fail-safes are in place.
Culture also needs to be responsive to the size and the context of each agency — the smaller agencies already tend to be more flexible and quicker to course correct.
The APS needs a data-literate SES cohort, who understand the risks, threats and opportunities that data combined with technologies such as AI bring. Initiatives such as SES training courses need continued investment to equip the top ranks of the public service for the challenges they will face in delivering on the strategy.
Addressing the “weary resentment” of our workers in “a starved public service” will take a strong political will to address long-standing resourcing issues. Prioritisation of initiatives will be key and a rationalisation of existing projects.
The reliance of the APS on consultants and contractors has been widely discussed in recent weeks. Without both a lift of average staffing level caps for agencies (while the 2023 budget sees a 3% increase across the APS, some agencies have increases while others have decreases in their caps) and a way to provide salaries that match the market, it is unclear where the specialist skills currently provided by contractors and consultants will come from. As the Thodey review of the APS found, highly skilled staff “do not look at the APS as a potential employer“.
The APS budget cycle and model also offer particular challenges for data and technology projects. Large projects to deliver new capabilities are frequently funded through New Policy Proposals (NPPs). The funding to support the new capability once implemented, and to – at the end of its lifecycle – decommission it, is often lacking. This is a contributing factor to the issues with legacy technology mentioned in the strategy.
The strategy will open to stakeholder consultation next month and will also seek views on meaningful actions to help achieve the vision, for inclusion in the accompanying implementation plan.
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Data strategies emerging in digital governments of the future
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