Digital transformation: why Government organisations can, do, and should move fast

Speed is something that we often talk about in business, but less so around government. Whether it be on a local, state or federal level, there’s a long-standing acceptance that lengthy approval processes and due diligence procedures impede what — and how quickly — governments can deliver.

Those days are gone.

After years of bushfires, floods and COVID, we now have demonstrable proof that Australian governments can react quickly — and there’s no going back.

Delivering services fast (that citizens trust)

Let’s look at COVID-19 as an example. The Service Victoria mobile app was quickly updated to enable QR code check-ins and give citizens access to border permits. The Victorian government also managed to pivot and build on the state government agency’s existing architecture to provide digital regional travel vouchers in just 2.5 days.

Meanwhile, NSW Health Pathology created an automated SMS notification service that could deliver 2-hour COVID-19 test results. By using AWS’ ready-made cloud capabilities, the team was able to take the product from idea to delivery in just 2 weeks. By mid-November 2021, the system had provided 4.25 million results and saved frontline workers over 1 million clinical hours.

These are just a few of the proof points that demonstrate governments can generate quick solutions capable of servicing entire populations. They also prove that departments already have the talent to get things done — they simply wouldn’t have survived COVID otherwise. Now, as technology continues to evolve, training and certification must be an on-going priority so that staff can continue to innovate quickly.

Why move fast if there’s no crisis?

Some might argue that just because we can move fast, it doesn’t mean we have to. This is true to some degree, but while we may not always need to roll out new applications within 2.5 days of conception, we also don’t want — or need — to return to the 12-month+ turnaround that we tolerated in the past.

A key driving force moving forward will be citizen satisfaction. The public can and will elect different ministers if they are not happy with their services. There is a generational shift happening from the millennials on down and this is only going to get faster and more prevalent as time goes by. People now live much of their lives online — they can pay their gas bill or order their morning coffee from their phone. Why wouldn’t they also want to use these conveniences for renewing a driving licence or getting healthcare updates?

The workforce creating these solutions is also rapidly changing, by 2025, 50 per cent of the APS workforce will be Gen Y and Z— the so-called “digital natives”.

Citizens have new expectations, and governments need to be able to adapt quickly to meet them. The fundamental question for government agencies should therefore be: how fast can you go from having an idea to putting something in the hands of citizens?

Embracing automation

Speed and automation go hand in hand. Investing in digital infrastructure that leverages automation to improve operations will support faster rollout of services. This is where anything serverless comes into its own. By eliminating the whole infrastructure piece — the build, the operational overhead, the need to run infrastructure security and so on - you have the ability to spin up the capability to provide digital endpoints through API’s, while also having serverless data analytics running in the background.

This can be rooted at the very core of an organisation’s digital architecture. For example, automating policy based governance with automated code deployment and automated configuration evaluations can transform the traditionally long review cycle into one with predefined guardrails that enables rapid change. Meanwhile, automated security features can detect and address abnormal operating patterns before they impact citizens.

Another crucial piece of the puzzle is having ready-made landing zones for application deployment. By using a multi-account environment such as a AWS Control Tower, organisations can create customisable landing zones to quickly deploy workloads without having to create new settings for each organisational unit. The end result is faster, simpler, and largely automated product launches.

These technologies that you might think of as forward-leaning already exist. In fact, all these features are out-of-the-box services provided by AWS. So, once you’ve invested in the underlying capability, everything you need is just a matter of activating, rather than creating.

Keeping the two-way door open

One reason for government’s traditionally slow pace is that decision makers are hesitant to waste public funds. Spending millions on a state of the art, on-premise IT infrastructure is all well and good but what happens when that technology is suddenly outdated? This kind of thinking, while understandable, often inhibits innovation.

I have written an entire article about architectural two-way doors which explains the philosophy in detail but, put simply, two-way door decisions are ones that can be reversed or changed with minimal consequences. Unlike on-premise IT systems, cloud infrastructure is inherently a two-way door as it can be modified instantly. It offers a flexible and scalable foundation which organisations can tailor continuously to suit their fluctuating needs. If a certain program isn’t working, you can simply stop paying for it and switch to another.

With this pay as you go approach, governments can dip their toe in the water. They can try, test, deploy, learn, and move on without huge financial or logistical repercussions. Two-way door architecture therefore safeguards governments from unnecessary spending and allows for low-risk and high-speed innovation.

It’s all right to get it wrong

Although the instinct might be to perfect something before rolling it out to the public, the cost of fixing something is greater the further down the line you get. So, it can actually be faster and cheaper to deploy quickly and learn from any mistakes.

The goal for governments is not to win market share but to provide a service that citizens can use effectively. Utilising a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) method can help to facilitate this. The CI/CD approach introduces automation into the early stages of development and then uses it to continuously evaluate and improve the product as it is used by citizens. This enables quick learning about what’s working and what isn’t, which ultimately gets a better product to citizens in a shorter time frame.?

As we move forward, government organisations have an opportunity to build on their existing successes. Organisations that embrace innovation, prioritise professional development and utilise the fluidity of cloud-based architecture to automate processes and provide constant improvements will boost citizen satisfaction by delivering faster and better services.