In October this year, Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) chief executive Chris Fechner will have been in the role for five years. He will become the agency’s first CEO to serve out a full five-year contract term.
That’s no small achievement. The organisation, which started life as the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) in 2015, has had a bumpy ride through some tumultuous changes of direction under different governments and different political leaders.
The DTA is a very different organisation today than when Mr Fechner took the role. It has shifted from digital delivery responsibilities to providing technology policy programs, advice and procurement support infrastructure to agencies across the government.
In this episode of Delivery: A GovTech Podcast, Mr Fechner chronicles difficult organisational and internal cultural changes that have led the DTA to the position it holds today.
Mr Fechner outlines the ways in which the federal government now engages with industry, and how suppliers can interact with the DTA.
And for anyone looking for an organisational update on how AI tools are being investigated and experimented with across government, this interview describes the government’s ambition, but also the caution with which it is approaching AI as a productivity gamechanger.
When Mr Fechner took the reins at the DTA, he had just completed senior delivery roles, as chief digital and product officer at ServiceNSW and then as chief customer and digital officer at the Queensland government.
His first task was to re-orientate from delivery to policy and advice.
“When I came in, the first really big problem was that a lot of the orchestration at the DTA was about still being a service delivery organisation,” Mr Fechner said.
“But we didn’t quite have the right balance of skills and capabilities to transition into a policy assurance agency, so in the first couple of years, we had over 50 per cent attrition.
“[We had] lots of turnover, so people going to places like Services Australia to work. And when you’ve got really high attrition, you really can’t get a lot of internal momentum going, because you just start [to get some momentum] and then it drops.”
That was a significant challenge and took some time to overcome, and then to subsequently build trust with the big delivery agencies. He says being inside the Department of Finance alongside Services Australia has produced a productive relationship.
This has been especially important through the roll-out of Australian Public Service AI capability, and building both the expertise and the trust in AI systems. The government is ambitious about what it wants to do with AI, but in the shadow of the Robodebt experience is also cautious about its implementation.
The GovAI allows public service professionals to experiment with AI tools without being concerned about government data getting tied up in external large language models.
“[GovAI] is something that allows us to use generative AI on sensitive government information without the fear that it’s going to link into one of the big, large language models somewhere,” Mr Fechner told the podcast.
“It also provides a safe platform environment to actually support people experimenting inside of government.
Acknowledging that government routinely handles sensitive information, the kind of information that can cause damage either to government or to citizens, Mr Fechner said, “we have a higher duty of care than most people to make sure that that data is appropriately used with artificial intelligence.”
“We know that technology can cause permanent harms to people, and the controls that the DTA puts in the policy environment is a really strong vehicle to support people adopting AI,” he said.
“But we are working hard to make sure that people truly understand the risk of applying AI in their particular context, especially if it can create harms to people, especially if those harms are irreversible.”
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