The ACT government is a relatively small jurisdiction, but its technology footprint is anything but simple.
It serves a population of just under 500,000 people, while also providing services to a much larger geography as a regional, including its public hospital system. It employs about 38,000 public servants across schools, hospitals, transport, municipal services, justice, community safety and the rest of the machinery of government.
And unlike other jurisdictions, it operates as both a state-level government and a municipal government. That’s running hospitals and police, as well as garbage collection and local libraries.
That means Digital Canberra, the ACT government’s new digital, data and technology directorate, is being built to support everything from hospitals and schools to buses, bins, payroll, finance systems, digital health and citizen-facing services.
In this episode of Delivery: A GovTech Podcast, Digital Canberra deputy director-general Bettina Konti talks through the task of consolidating a fragmented government technology environment into a whole-of-government digital capability.
Digital Canberra was established on 1 July last year, bringing together the central digital, data and technology services function with the ACT’s health technology capability. It is now in the process of progressively transitioning technology functions from across directorates into the new central agency.
The ambition is not simply to centralise control, Ms Konti says, but to reduce technology debt, improve services and make better use of strategic platforms already inside government.
“Just like lots of other government jurisdictions, we have a lot of technology debt,” Ms Konti says.
That debt has built up through years of investment in technology “on an initiative by initiative basis or a program by program basis”, producing siloed systems that were not designed to talk to each other or be reused across government.
The new model is intended to shift the ACT away from that pattern.
“You design for whole of government and then you implement for a particular initiative,” Ms Konti says.
The goal is to ensure new investments are made around common functions, rather than one-off programs, so that systems can remain current and be reused by multiple agencies.
Ms Konti says most of the platforms the ACT government needs are already in place. The gap is in the skills and capability required to configure products and services on those platforms in a consistent, whole-of-government way.
That is also changing the workforce model. Technology staff and CIOs from across directorates will move into Digital Canberra, while still supporting the business systems and needs of their home directorates.
For suppliers, the message is clear: the ACT government is not always looking for another technology solution.
“Most of the technology we need already exists inside ACT government,” Ms Konti says. “We just need to know how to use it better.”
There will still be a role for the local technology sector, particularly where government needs specialist skills, surge capacity or help delivering products on existing platforms. But Ms Konti says the preference is to build enduring capability inside the public service wherever possible.
“If we need to use consultants, it will be because we can’t find people with that particular knowledge base or skill set in the ACT public service,” she says.
Where external help is brought in, the expectation is that suppliers transfer knowledge along the way.
Ms Konti also talks about the importance of design in government technology delivery. She says tight timelines often mean the design phase is the first thing to be cut, which can lead to systems that technically deliver the required outcome but do not make services easier for the community or more efficient for government.
Digital Canberra is trying to put design back into the systems development lifecycle through a two-pass technology investment process.
“The theory is quite simple: it’s measure twice, cut once,” Ms Konti says.
The same discipline is being applied to artificial intelligence.
The ACT government already uses AI in some operational settings, including cameras on emergency services towers to help detect fires. It has also established an AI assurance framework and an AI working group that considers proposed AI uses through the lenses of ethics, privacy, safety, cyber security and utility.
Ms Konti says she is “very excited” about the opportunities presented by AI, but also “very concerned” about the risks.
“We can’t just throw AI into the mix and be done with it,” she says.
Instead, government needs to think about AI as part of a whole system, including the people affected by automation, the staff whose roles may change, and the mechanisms needed to monitor whether AI systems are producing the intended outcomes.
For Ms Konti, human-centred design becomes even more important as AI adoption grows.
“AI might be able to automate particular functions, but it won’t – for a while at least – understand how humans experience those functions and services,” she says.
That, she says, is where public servants will remain critical: understanding how people experience services, where empathy is required, and when complaints or feedback indicate that systems need to be changed.
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.