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Putting People at the Centre - Creating a Framework for Ongoing Reform within Government

Strategies

• Responding to issues holistically across government
• Building capabilities within agencies
• Effective sharing of resources

The development of citizen-centred services as part of eGovernment will inevitably involve changes to the way government works.

Increasing emphasis on issues rather than sectors, on single entry points, event-based service packages and unique assembly requires more communication and integration inside government, with departments combining and coordinating resources to provide seamless services and responses to issues. Closer integration will also reduce duplication — for example, in multiple data storage and redundant delivery channels — and encourage agencies to harmonise their business processes.

However, it will not spell the end of separate departments. Organising the machinery of government into departments means that each agency has a common purpose, appropriate specialist skills and a manageable span of control. It also allows the Government to focus when it needs to on specific sectors of the economy and society, and specific functional areas. While departments will remain, they will change — eGovernment has an important role to play in reforming internal agency and departmental operations.

Other reforms must take into account the need for a sophisticated capacity to develop whole-ofgovernment responses to specific opportunities and policy issues. eGovernment infrastructure will provide the underlying ICT support for this response capability, which must be accompanied by other operational, skills and management reforms.

Responding To Issues Holistically Across Government

The organisation of government into departments based on sectors of interest allows the development of expertise in particular subjects and is generally the most effective structure for formulating policy and delivering services.

However, as demand continues to grow for a more user-focused approach to services, there is an increasing need to formulate more holistic responses by integrating services and resources. One of the most profound benefits of eGovernment will be a vastly improved capacity to connect activities across different parts of government. It is the evolution of sophisticated information networks and communications technology that enables this. However, technology alone is not enough — it will also need to be supported by complementary public sector governance models that can operate across departments.

There are at least three areas of real benefit to Victorians:

1. New Or Improved Programs, Services Or Ideas

A cross-departmental response capability adds flexibility to the Government's capacity to create new services or improve on existing ones. More collective governance models can make truly whole-ofgovernment services possible by eliminating the need to operate on departmental or agency lines. Increasingly, government programs will lend themselves to this management model — the proposed Electronic Directory Services Strategy and the Victorian Online Gateway are examples.

2. Addressing Complex Policy Issues

Thorny policy issues are often made more difficult to address because they affect a range of policy sectors and may have no natural organisational home in government. Such issues can be more effectively dealt with under a purpose-built framework that is free of departmental limits and agendas. It might be used to meet particular requirements of a location (e.g. regional renewal programs in areas such as the Latrobe Valley or other community-building projects) or broad-based capabilities (e.g. e-commerce for the whole state), or be specific to a single, complex policy issue (e.g. community safety, aged care or drug abuse programs).

3. Crisis Response Capability

Having a range of holistic response models would increase the Government's effectiveness in dealing with emergency situations, which often require action from a range of departments. The most appropriate model could be quickly invoked to manage programs dealing, for example, with emergency gas or water shortages, natural disasters or terrorism. Three things are required to support new operational models that deliver a government-wide response.

• Effective governance — The mandate or authority to act in a given situation, a framework for reporting and accountability, a recognised budget process and reward system.
• Business systems — The operating business and decision-making processes that support cross-government activities. These include models for how response teams operate internally and processes to secure cooperation from different areas of government.
• Physical infrastructure — The ICT and other systems needed to combine agency services for presentation to the community in an integrated way. These include business processes and information management systems, although the actual custodianship of most data could remain with individual agencies.

These elements are not simply a central agency turned on its side. The strength of such a response layer is that it is free of departmental ownership and control and is therefore able to resolve problems without having to manage more specific departmental objectives.

Building Capabilities Within Agencies

Investment in ICT systems as well as in electronic service development has delivered substantial financial and other benefits to the Victorian Government as well as to citizens.

There are still significant benefits to be gained simply by making better use of existing systems in agency business processes — with the aims of improving services, and of improving relationships with the Government's supplier network.

There are also advantages for relationships with external delivery partners the Government works with to build and maintain infrastructure, undertake research and development, manage land and water, and develop industry.

eGovernment can make it easier to coordinate and integrate these complex relationships, not least by increasing the capacity to share data and knowledge. Since the systems required to make this happen and the resulting benefits will be spread across the entire economy, individual firms will have little incentive to invest in the necessary supporting infrastructure. This is likely to be predominantly the task of government.

The Government's Electronic Commerce for Procurement (EC4P) program already provides a framework for electronic commerce between suppliers and government departments. It aims to make government purchasing more efficient by improving price discovery, reducing delays in supply, and eliminating unnecessary business processes in the purchasing chain.

While the Government can certainly make better use of current systems, the real pay-off will come from increasing cooperation and experimentation.

Effective Sharing of Resources

Sharing resources within and between agencies improves interoperability, cuts costs, increases capacity and reduces risks. Realising these benefits means that richer, more relevant services can be developed and delivered more efficiently and cheaply. Shared resources of three kinds are relevant to eGovernment.

• Infrastructure — Where agencies share assets such as data networks and technical resources such as centres of expertise in messaging.
• Standards — Where agencies agree on the form in which they will exchange data, information and knowledge, including messaging standards and transfer standards for files produced by desktop applications.
• Information — Where agencies pool data and information, and share the applications needed to use those resources. State agencies hold data of tremendous economic, social and environmental value, including spatial information, demographic series, and business indicators. In the past, a variety of legal, administrative and technical barriers have made it difficult for agencies to share this data. A high priority will be to identify the relevant barriers to information sharing and design robust and responsible frameworks, covering privacy and security for example, to reduce or overcome them.

A diagramatical representation of citizen/business/community interaction with government.

Last updated: 20 October 2011

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