Published on the 11/05/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

The acting CEO of Australia’s Digital Transformation Office has admitted to being “just a little terrified” at the Minister’s vision for the organisation…

David Hazlehurst, acting CEO of the interim DTO (which will be formally established on 1 July this year) spoke at CeBIT last week shortly after the Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull, who outlined the pivotal role he envisions for the recently conceived DTO.

The central tenet for the DTO will be to put the citizen at the centre of any interactions with Government, in order to improve and streamline services. Hazlehurst acknowledged that he expected to have to “ginger” quite a lot of government departments into action, and said that the DTO would assemble “fix-it-squads” that could go in and work with departments as they rolled out new DTO designed services.

At present according to Hazlehurst: “We still tend to design things with our own interest in mind not the user’s … we tend to deliver things in silos.”

That often led to complications for users when attempting to interact with government departments online forcing them to then visit government shopfronts or call contact centres, injecting additional costs into the service.

Hazlehurst indicated he was not ruling out quite radical reforms, floating for example the idea that Australia’s banks could be responsible for not only authenticating citizen identity but also providing digital mailboxes, which could house government communications.

That would necessarily require significant bank systems overhaul and costs, but Hazlehurst did not address the issue.

At least initially the DTO team of around 100-120 people will be faced with more prosaic tasks.

It has already released an initial version of the Digital Services Standard – a list of 16 criteria to ensure a consistent approach to design and delivery which all new services will need to comply with from July this year.

Government departments are also required to develop transformation plans which explain how services will be consistent with the standard, by the end of 2017.

Hazlehurst said that the DTO would in the future “own” the customer experience – setting out what services should look like, though departments would be left to execute against that.

DTO will also; “Be the business owners (and designers) of common platforms – think of them as things Government only needs one of,” such as authentication services, or central websites, he said.

Hazlehurst said that the DTO would also monitor and report on Government progress with information systems through a digital dashboard, delivering greater transparency.

Finally Hazlehurst said that the DTO would be engaging with private sector organisations and think tanks in more flexible ways in order to establish: “Clever ways of partnering or procuring – not the tangled web of government procurement.

“Perhaps most important is the idea that in the transformation government will not end up doing everything. Government is already becoming more of a wholesaler of services and information and data and other people in the private sector are packaging that up and retailing it. I think there will be a lot more of that in the transformation we are talking about,” said Hazlehurst.