Complexities & Opportunities on Transformation within Government

Scott Cass-Dunbar at UXDX APAC. Video: https://youtu.be/GJex1N-E9h8

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Joining the DTA and the chief strategy officer remit

[00:00:00] Scott: I joined the Digital Transformation Agency in June of 2020, so as you can imagine, an incredibly difficult time with everything going on around the globe. I came in from a consulting background, as Mira just said. I was with KPMG before I joined the DTA. The DTA is a relatively small agency. We've got about 350 people thereabouts, spread between Canberra and also Sydney. But I really came in because the mission that the DTA has is, I feel, just so critically important, and I'm just incredibly passionate about what it is we do.

[00:00:42] In my role as the chief strategy officer here I've got a pretty broad remit. I have the overarching digital transformation strategy for the Australian government, supporting that whole-of-government digital architecture. I'll probably touch on the architecture a little bit later on. Whole-of-government digital capability, so thinking about the human aspects in terms of skills and capabilities that we need both now and for the future within the public sector. And also looking at whole-of-government digital investment, so thinking about the entire life cycle: what is it that we've already invested in, what is it we're thinking about investing in now, what do we have underway at the moment, what are we looking at potentially retiring, and how do we make the most out of all that. As I said, Rory, it's a pretty broad remit, but it's super exciting.

[00:01:30] Rory: Yeah, it's crazily broad from my perspective. There are so many avenues or areas that you could focus on, and government is so broad. How do you define what you're going to do right now and which departments you're going to work with?

Linking strategy to policy objectives

[00:01:50] Scott: Look, it is big and it is complex. But in terms of what we do as a government, we have policy objectives that get laid down at a political layer, which really does set the direction in terms of what we do. The beauty of having such a broad remit is that everything that I have in my teams is also intertwined. If you think about the strategy, the strategy does map up to a policy objective. Right now, one of our core policy objectives is about getting the vaccine in and getting people vaccinated, so that's a core aim that we've got to achieve.

[00:02:31] The strategy has to align and support that, but really draw a red thread through to everything that we do down at an initiative layer or a product layer, to make sure that it maps together. Strategy is informed by the architecture. When we think about architecture in government, it's not just about technology. It's actually about thinking about people, process, technology, policy, legislation, and also the alliances we have within the broader market. How that then works with the capability part that we bring in, how we bring those investments into it. It's quite an organic beast that's always moving and shifting, but with our focus at the top on those objectives it's pretty easy to prioritize what we need to do and when we need to do it. It's just complex.

[00:03:15] Rory: Great. I like the link to policy. Is there ever any contention? I guess there are multiple ministers, they each have their portfolios, they each have their core aims that they'd like to achieve. Granted, I think the vaccine rollout trumps everything at the moment. But how do you, as the chief strategy officer, marry up those different policy needs from your stakeholders to align to the vision and the mission that you're going to move forward with?

[00:03:48] Scott: Well, Rory, I think it really is about rolling that right up to the biggest policy objective. Another one is around cementing the Australian economy's recovery from COVID [?]. That's absolutely critical to what we need to do as a nation. Being able to show that the candidate initiatives that are coming through, looking at the impact that they will drive and the outcome that they actually produce, naturally triages where the focus goes.

[00:04:18] I think, though, as you'd appreciate, in any large organization, and government for all intents and purposes is almost like a conglomerate, there are always going to be competing priorities. But as we progress down that digital transformation agenda, what we're seeing is that there are more and more synergies between the kinds of objectives and also the kinds of tools that we're looking to use. They might be for different purposes, but we may actually be able to build once and use many, to use an engineering analogy.

Bringing people along with change

[00:04:51] Rory: Great. I just wanted to come to people, process, technology. On the people side of things, is there ever any pushback? You're an external agency, and you're coming into existing departments and existing teams and suggesting some changes. I love the quote, "Everybody loves change, but they hate being changed." How do you deal with that, coming in externally to teams?

[00:05:19] Scott: Well, look, there are a lot of different things and different strategies that we use. So much of it is about identifying the value for the individual, making it really personal in terms of what the benefit is that the change will actually bring. In terms of what we do for government, I think there's a galvanizing focus when you join the public sector. I've come from the private sector, and the reason I've done that is I'm totally committed to wanting to build a better country and build a better digital experience for citizens.

[00:06:02] I was listening in very closely to the last speakers in the last segment, and again, I think that commonality of mission and commonality of purpose matters. When you've got that shared drive to the objective that you're looking to produce, what's changing is not necessarily comfortable, but understanding your individual role and your contribution through that change, and the outcome that it brings, makes it a lot easier for people to get on board. Because then people are able to personalize where they fit in the entire picture and what they're working towards.

[00:06:40] Rory: Great. If you're being driven by policy... Often when people talk about having a mission and being mission-driven, they talk about the benefit to the end customer, or citizen in this instance. Is there any challenge in mapping those two, the policy that's coming in and the actual end goal or end value for the citizen?

What citizens want from government services

[00:07:07] Scott: Yes, there is. Through our research we've identified that across all government services there are a couple of broad, common points of focus [?] that our citizens really want us to zero in on. These are relatively common to all government services, and I think they're quite common to private sector services as well. Lifting those up and aligning them to the actual policy objectives is not, I don't think, that difficult.

[00:07:40] Just to give you an example of some of those points of focus: some of them are around being able to find a single source of truth. Within a government you've got lots and lots of different departments and different agencies, and therefore there are a lot of different channels out there in the digital space and a lot of different content out there. We found, obviously through the pandemic [?] last year, that being able to bring that content together in a way that was really easy to consume, in a consistent manner, was really critical. That's something we hear from citizens all the time: not getting the right information in the right context at the right time.

[00:08:16] Making sure that for me, at my age, probably heading towards retirement, getting notifications from government around starting my career is probably not the right messaging for me in my context. Making sure that the right information is provided and it's more tailored and personalized. Our minister always talks about our mission in the DTA, and what we're doing in terms of government services, as really making those services simple, helpful, respectful and transparent, in terms of respecting people's privacy and also respecting people's time [?].

[00:08:52] One of the things that I certainly recognized coming into the public sector is that, unlike other digital channels you might have in the private sector, where it's about creating a really content-rich experience for an individual that keeps the eyeballs on the site and keeps people engaged, for the most part when people come in to engage with government, they want to get in quickly, get access to what they need to know, perform the transaction that they need and get on with their lives. So much of what we do is about trying to strip out the complexity of the process in terms of what we're trying to deliver for citizens.

[00:09:35] I think you get an alignment back to policy if you're focusing on those kinds of pain points, like just not knowing. Another one is not knowing how to actually reach the outcome: where to go and how to navigate. With government being relatively complex in the way it's organized here, a lot of our focus is on making sure that our citizens and customers don't need to know the departmental structure and how things are organized. The information is just brought to them for their purpose.

Common platforms and capabilities across government

[00:10:03] Rory: Great. Based on that response, I'm going to jump from people into technology. I have more questions, but the single source of truth is so common in a lot of large organizations. I think it particularly touches on when you have decentralized teams, as we were talking about, that you might need a centralized platform for some of the core pieces of data or infrastructure. Often in enterprises, they'll create a team to manage that centralized platform, the core team as it's often called. Do you do something similar? How are you building out a single source of truth for citizens that other departments hook into, or how are you tackling that challenge?

[00:10:48] Scott: Look, it's a really good question, Rory. It's a real combination of being able to bring different approaches together to achieve the outcome. Across the enterprise there is a very distributed set of technology platforms that have been built over time. As is the case in most industries, there is still a considerable amount of legacy technology in place. Making use of what we've already invested in, along with what we're planning to invest in, to bring that together in a coherent model is really what we're looking to do with the architecture.

[00:11:29] A lot of the architecture is to identify [?] common platforms, but by platforms I don't necessarily mean products. It is about the capabilities that we need to be able to deliver government. An example of that is one of the projects that's been driven by the DTA over the last couple of years, around digital identity. Digital identity is seen as a common need, there to bring together the way people interact with government services, where they provide their identity information once and are then able to leverage that to access services over and over.

[00:12:04] So it's not necessarily only that single source of truth. Our responsibility in the public sector is to absolutely protect the use of public money in terms of what we invest in. It's not always about just putting in the latest and greatest and newest. It's about making sure that we've got a complete view of that entire ecosystem. I know it's quite a long answer, but it's not really about building a central capability that just does it for everyone else. It's about making use of capabilities that we have right across government, so the best-placed part of government to deliver a particular capability can get on and do that.

Shifting senior leaders from a waterfall mindset

[00:12:46] Rory: Great, that's a brilliant segue into the process side of the people, process, technology piece. Enabling that is helping other departments to adapt and go through their own digital transformations, I'm assuming, as part of the remit. That is one of the biggest challenges that I personally face in my career. When companies are very set in their ways, in a waterfall way of working, it can be very difficult to change the mindsets of people at multiple levels in the organization. If we start with the C-suite or the senior leaders in the departments, how do you tackle that? If I use the example of waterfall, it would be very much, here's a budget, here's our fixed scope, here's our fixed time, versus here's our mission, here's our team, and let's iterate and move through it. How do you tackle that shift in mindset?

[00:13:51] Scott: Look, I think the mindset shift is incredibly challenging. I think it has to be done at all levels. One of the things out of my capability function in the DTA is the digital profession, which was stood up in April 2020, so it's still relatively new. The digital profession looks to work at all tiers of an individual's career journey within the public sector. From the very senior execs, who may not have the deepest understanding of digital or agile delivery techniques: what do those concepts mean, why would you change from that waterfall mindset into being more iterative and learning from the evidence as you go through the process, and what are the opportunities that brings?

[00:14:45] All the way through to the people who are really commencing their careers in the APS, where we have programs focused on graduates, cadets and apprentices who are just starting their careers, and then specialists in areas like cyber who are looking to work within government. We're trying to make sure that we're changing the mindset at both ends and also in the middle. Now, that does take some time.

[00:15:14] There are definitely processes within government which are really well codified, have worked for a long period of time and have really stood the test of time as well. But what we found, particularly after the events in 2020, is that we've been forced to really think about things differently. The speed of delivery in 2020 was unlike anything that I've seen in government previously. The ability to work remotely, and we heard in the previous session about people moving from the States to Singapore and still staying completely connected and getting that work done. I think it's disrupted the delivery model and the mindset very rapidly. Personally, I feel we're at a great time. It hasn't been a great time last year, but the opportunity that it's brought is a real opportunity to challenge the way that we do things and do things differently.

[00:16:10] Rory: Yeah, it's a sentiment I'm hearing everywhere, that it's not the CEO or the CTO driving digital transformation, it's COVID-19 that's driving it.

[00:16:20] Scott: I think it's everybody, though. And I do think in the public sector there's such a common purpose, wanting to do things better and achieve better outcomes, and that galvanizes people behind that mission as well.

Just start: the natural disaster example

[00:16:35] Rory: Okay. As you mentioned, it's needed at multiple levels. Where do you begin? When you start a new project in a new remit with new departments, how do you kick off your transformation?

[00:16:53] Scott: Well, I have a pretty simple philosophy: if you don't start, you don't start [?]. You have to just start. Quite often in government there can be a propensity to sit back and really plan out, to go back to that waterfall mindset, thinking about what the end outcome is that I'm going to achieve and then what all the steps are that we need to go through to actually achieve it. In terms of having to deliver faster, it's about starting with an evidence base that actually does make sense.

[00:17:28] Let me give you an example. One of the pieces of work that the teams have been working on recently has been around experiencing a natural disaster. If you go back to January 2020, before COVID actually landed, we went through some of the worst bushfires we've ever seen within Australia. The team went through and modeled it out, using desktop research to start with. I think there were between a thousand and fifteen hundred pieces of desktop research [?] that they could tap into. What are the experiences of citizens across a range of cohorts, from preparing for a natural disaster, to experiencing it, so what happens during a natural disaster, what happens after a disaster, and then what happens when you rebuild?

[00:18:12] Breaking it down into those phases and then thinking about what the obstacles are, and then thinking about what the opportunities are. That very user-centered design, which puts the citizen right at the center of what we do, allows people to really rally behind what the whole purpose is. And when you start to bring MDTs, multidisciplinary teams, together, from very senior people, policy people, technologists, process people, legislators, they all bring very different perspectives, which constantly challenge the assumptions and thoughts that you have when you commit to these processes.

[00:18:54] It's by bringing that mindset that allows you not to start with "it has to be perfect and it has to be right the first time," and to allow it to iterate and evolve. That is critical. If you don't start somewhere, and it can be starting with the wrong set of assumptions that you may prove wrong, that is still the start of the journey, rather than trying to plan out the perfect world that's going to be at the end of the rainbow that you never get to.

Balancing momentum with bringing people along

[00:19:26] Rory: Right. I think that's a perfect way of tackling it. If you don't start, you end up in analysis paralysis. But how do you marry that with having to make sure you bring everybody along, so you're not just railroading people and forcing through change? How do you marry up those two seemingly contradictory approaches?

[00:19:53] Scott: Yeah, it's not easy. Sometimes, Rory, it can be historical, or it can be personal biases that hold people back from wanting to adopt change. But as I said before, I think it is about being able to really personalize the value in it for individuals, to understand why what we're doing is really important now, and what difference it actually creates in somebody's life.

[00:20:24] I break things down in really simple terms when I think about government. If I'm going to drop my kids off to school and it's twenty to nine in the morning, and I've just got a notification from government to log on to my myGov account, how long is it going to take me to actually complete that interaction? If I know it's going to take me five minutes, I'll probably do it there and then, because I know I can. If I don't know, and it might take me half an hour, I may not get the kids to school. So the role that an individual plays in helping make that citizen's life better, just by understanding how long it's going to take to do something, actually does give you a personal return in terms of what you've delivered.

[00:21:13] One of the most amazing things about working in the public sector is that you can genuinely see the impact of the work that you do on society. It's probably not easier than the private sector, but you can measure the outcome that it actually creates. Knowing where you fit within the whole process of creating and driving that better outcome is very rewarding, and I think that drives people to get on the bus in the department.

[00:21:46] Rory: Yeah, it's definitely a great point about government being slightly different to a profit company making a bit more money. There's a question coming from the audience as well, and this is one that I've struggled with myself. You can sell the vision, you can sell "this is what we're trying to achieve," and everybody's on board. And then you go, "Well, let's just get started and let's do this bit." And I always get hit with, "Well, what about...? You just need to think about it a bit more. You need to cover these edge cases. We can't move too quickly, we can't break things." How do you move from that mindset, where people are used to "give me my ten-page requirements document, I'll make sure everything's in there and then I'll give you my blessing," to "actually, no, we're going to just start with this very small piece, make sure it works and then iterate from there"?

[00:22:41] Scott: From a government perspective there is a challenge. We are here to make sure that we achieve the best possible value for money for every citizen's dollar that's invested. Ensuring there is enough rigor in design and analysis to make sure that the dollar is not going to be wasted is really important. But also making sure that you develop your early proofs of concept, which are able to test the value that's actually delivered by a service or a change that's being proposed, that you can then build upon to unlock further value.

[00:23:23] A lot of what we're trying to do at the moment is think about those capability platforms. How could they be leveraged in different scenarios? How would they mean that we don't have to go off and build or procure or stand up a different system for a capability that might be used in a completely different context? Identity is a really good case in point there. But it is a balance and it is a challenge. In terms of digital transformation, the opportunity is so fast moving. Even if I just think about the technology tools that are available, the value that can be unlocked changes so rapidly. It does come back to that philosophy of just making sure that we start, but making sure we do it with precaution as well [?].

Tips for getting past the blockers

[00:24:22] Rory: Great. Do you have any tips for people who might be encountering that kind of blocker, where they're trying to kick off some initiative just to get something started, but they keep getting pushed back towards doing the full rigor and the full analysis?

[00:24:41] Scott: I think engage early and engage often with the stakeholders. That's really critical. Engage with the most likely blockers that you can identify, to find out what those macro or micro level objections actually are. Quite often you find that it's not actually a blocker. You might get an area that says, "Oh, you can't do that because the legislation says you can't." Then you actually start to work through the legislation and you find, well, the legislation's actually an enabler of this. It's not a blocker. What we've found over time is that folklore has taken over from the law and that's become the rules.

[00:25:27] So take the time to unpack those objections, and if they are material and they are warranted, demonstrate that humility. In the DTA it's not about being right, it's about actually delivering the best services to citizens. Challenging those hypotheses at the start, and challenging early, is really critical. The other tip I would give is work in the open as much as possible. Make sure that there's genuine visibility for stakeholders around what you're planning to do and what the intent is. If people disagree, they will be vocal and they will stand up early, and it's better to know that at the start of the process than later on. That co-design, the collaboration, bringing people into the design process.

Third parties, sourcing and open source

[00:26:19] Rory: Great. There's a follow-up question that I think is really interesting. It's great when things are within your control, in your remit. Have you had any challenges dealing with third-party providers in this more iterative way of working? Have you had to make any contractual changes, or anything like that, to manage the relationships with third parties?

[00:26:45] Scott: Look, it's such a dynamic ecosystem, and it's reflected in one of our pillars. When I mentioned people, process, technology, policy, legislation, the other one was alliances. Alliances really speak to that broader ecosystem. Within the public sector we can't do this on our own. We really do need the help of our technology partners and delivery partners. We need innovators that are bringing new and different ideas to us in terms of what we can do. Making sure that we've got contractual frameworks in place that provide the flexibility to have SMEs work with us, as well as really large multinationals, is really important.

[00:27:36] Another part of the DTA, outside of my area, looks at the strategic sourcing arrangements for digital within government. Through the marketplace that the DTA runs, the majority of the work that flows through goes to those SME areas within the market. Some of our more coordinated procurements are centered [?] on the largest volume areas, where we have multiple transactions in government, so areas like Microsoft licensing, because there is a common need across the different departments and agencies.

[00:28:11] But on the contractual areas, it changes all the time, and we're constantly hearing from the market in terms of what works for them. We have a digital sourcing network that we also coordinate within the DTA, and it works right across government to identify what's working, what's not working, where the barriers are at the moment, how we can refine it, whether there's an opportunity for something at a whole-of-government level, or whether an agency might take the lead because they've got a specialist capability. It's a multi-pronged approach. Again, really complex, but the intent is to bring the best outcomes for government and the market.

[00:28:54] Rory: Great. One example that comes to mind, based on your response there: I heard the Irish government, when they produced their COVID app, had as one of their conditions when they went to contract that it had to be open source. The reasoning behind that was, A, it's government, so they were saying this is taxpayer funded so it should be open. And B, it was building trust, because you're asking for a lot of data from people. Is that something that you're looking at?

[00:29:22] Scott: Yeah, definitely. Open source has been a strong objective in the Australian government for a long period of time. There's been a lot of work since the time I've been here. If I take digital identity, for example, they're making sure that the identity framework and the design and everything else is done in the open, so that people can get a view of privacy and controls and risk and security and make their own assessments. I think that's critical. What we do recognize here within government, if I come back to those higher level priorities, is that government is an economic enabler and should be an economic enabler for the country. So whatever we can do that allows further innovation to build upon the work that we do, I think, is really important.

Careers, roles and a common language for digital skills

[00:30:17] Rory: Great. As I said earlier on, I want to come back to people. One of the biggest challenges that I face in trying to change around the processes is people saying, "You're moving my cheese," or "Who moved my cheese?" Yesterday my job was to do this, now you're saying today my job is to do this. I'm talking more at the team level, the individual contributors of the team. Government can have a bad reputation for people not being too flexible. Whether that's earned or not, I won't go into. But how do you deal with the people who are actively changing, asking them to shift from waiting for a very specified requirements document to getting involved, talking to customers and finding out their needs?

[00:31:07] Scott: Look, we do a lot there. If I come back to the profession and what it's designed to enable for digital practitioners within government, I don't think there have been, in the past, frameworks or approaches that have allowed people to take control of their own careers and map where they want to go. We've been doing a lot of work in recent times, in conjunction with people like the APSC within government, to look at how you actually map out what a digital professional looks like, what those roles are, and then the skills that you might actually need to work within government.

[00:31:45] We've gone through and mapped more than 150 digital roles across government. We've taken that back to the Skills Framework for the Information Age, the SFIA 7 framework, to underpin it, to get a common language and taxonomy around what those skills actually are. Then we've done some good beta work around career pathways: where might I want to go with a career, and what are the skills that I would need to bring to that, to help people navigate where they go within the public sector to achieve their own personal outcomes. That's at a personal level.

[00:32:22] The other part within government, and I've certainly seen it since I've come in, and I think there has been a big change over time from the previous perceptions, is that there are a lot more open conversations with individuals about what the opportunities might look like. Particularly in digital, it is changing all the time. When we think about what our current skills and capabilities are and where we need to be in six months, 12 months, five years, it's a really dynamic change. Part of that is getting individuals ready to have those diverse careers. It's unlikely that you'll come in with one skill set at the start and, by the end of your career, have that same skill set.

[00:33:08] Rory: That's a great point. I'm a big fan of what we call T-shaped people. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the term, where you have a very deep specialty in one area but a broad understanding of multiple areas. When you were mapping out those 150 roles, did you factor in that kind of thing, so instead of saying this role is very rigid in this area, there's a bit of fluidity?

[00:33:34] Scott: There has to be that flexibility in there. Even when you start to break down a role type into skills, the priority of those skills will change depending on the circumstances or the actual work that an individual is doing. Whereas you might need a group of ten skills to do a role at a generic level, to do what you need to do within a particular context the focus might be on the first three. That needs to be really nuanced.

[00:34:08] The other thing is making sure that you've got a common understanding, or at least a common foundation to work from. I think this is a real challenge that we face in digital, not only in the public sector but everywhere: just the language that we use. Quite often the terminology that I use in my context will be completely different to your terminology. If I use a simple term like "system," what that means to me might mean something completely different to you. If I talk about a role type like service designer, what that means to me may be something completely different to you. Starting off with a definition that sets out the descriptors and the skills behind that role type, you might vehemently disagree with it, but at least you've got a reference point to disagree from. Without that reference point, when I say service designer and you say service designer, we could be talking about completely different things.

[00:35:06] Rory: Exactly. Do you publish those roles for the industry to see, or are they out in the...? I'm personally interested. I might look those up and have a read through.

[00:35:20] Scott: Yeah, we're doing a lot of work there. There are industry associations out there that have done their own skills models, and there's a whole broad range of private sector organizations that have come at this from different angles. We've got other professional organizations which are doing this as well. One of the things I find, coming into my role, is that the whole capability space is an incredibly complex, multifaceted beast. The more you get out there and talk to different individuals, the broader the perspectives become.

Closing: what makes the work exciting

[00:36:02] Rory: Great. We have literally one minute left. Do you want to leave on a success, or something you're really proud of that the department has achieved?

[00:36:12] Scott: Look, I think the success is still being worked on [?], seven or eight months in. The biggest thing for me is just the excitement of working in such an incredible area, where you have the ability to drive such broad social change. The complexity, the chaos, so many moving parts, is what makes it so exciting. And coming on to events like this, working with so many brilliant, talented people, both within the sector and beyond, that you can learn from, who approach things differently and achieve really good things.

[00:36:54] Rory: Great. Thank you very much for your time, Scott. I do think it's a really interesting mission that you have there, and I wish you the best of luck in continuing it.

[00:37:05] Scott: Thank you so much, Rory.