Next-generation citizens demand next-generation services: How government agencies are reimagining the citizen experience

Move fast, use data, stay citizen-centric. As Australia faced down the COVID-19 pandemic with effective leadership and extraordinary sacrifices from frontline workers, these three themes emerged as vital to its success.

Citizens bene?ted as the public sector moved quickly to protect communities and deliver essential services through flexible digital approaches. Trust between Australians and policymakers grew, thanks to proactive communication and transparency about the data underpinning key crisis responses. 

At every step of the crisis, government agencies delivered agile, data-driven and citizen-centric services. And now, as citizens navigate the next few months or even years of uncertainty, they are depending on the government to continue and expand on these services.

But at a time when government agencies need to do more with less, how can they meet these growing expectations?

A new era of government services

Winning in this new era of uncertainty starts with building on the steps agencies have already taken to ensure they can deliver outcomes in the faster, simpler and more personalised ways that citizens now expect.

Over the past decade, for example, we’ve seen Australians embrace government websites and one-stop service portals that help them access essential services when and where they want.

Approaches like these succeed because today’s citizens are also digital citizens, engaging and transacting online every day. They’ve grown used to seamless experiences from brands that continuously reinvent themselves to anticipate their needs. And as citizens’ expectations rise in the consumer arena, so too do their expectations for how they engage with the government.

That’s where emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation come in. I believe that over the next few years, these next-generation tools will be crucial in helping the public sector improve its understanding of population trends, more accurately predict citizen requirements and better tailor services to individuals, at scale.                                                                                                      

Boosting community engagement with smarter tools

Hearing Australia – the nation’s largest provider of government-funded hearing services – is one organisation delivering better services to citizens by layering innovative technological capabilities on top of its digital foundations.  

Serious ear and hearing issues affect one in three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. By offering free hearing checks to young children, Hearing Australia is working hard to tackle this issue. So far, the early years assessment program has seen the organisation conduct 6,000 tests in 200 communities.

Naturally, the testing program creates a lot of data, as does Hearing Australia’s work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community engagement officers. The challenge facing audiologists was how to collect, store and share this data in a way that honoured patient privacy while advancing community health outcomes.  

Until recently, information was painstakingly collated in Word documents or spreadsheets. But it was easy for errors to sneak in, or for details to be lost or duplicated. Access was also an issue, with audiologists travelling in remote areas finding it difficult to locate the information they needed, when they needed it.

Hearing Australia had already embraced cloud computing, using Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 to streamline its financial operations and practice management. So when audiologist Jacqui Peck decided to try her hand at building a mobile app, she found all the tools she needed at her fingertips.  

Peck had little technical experience. But working after hours and on weekends, she used the Microsoft Power Apps platform to build the first version of the app that would address her organisation’s data challenges.

Her efforts paid off. Now, any hearing test–related data uploaded to the app is automatically shared with the audiology team in real time. Field workers also get easy access to continuously updated community information – anything from prime local contacts to the whereabouts of parking spots.

Armed with this rich knowledge, audiologists can understand community requirements more quickly and accurately, and so develop more effective follow-up actions – ultimately delivering better health outcomes and citizen experiences.

Supporting jobseekers with personalised services

Leading Victorian healthcare provider, Austin Health, is another organisation improving its services by taking its existing digital technologies and building on them with more recent innovations.

Austin Health’s patient services assistants (PSAs) support patient care by performing essential jobs, including transporting patients between hospital departments. But recently, the organisation realised its paper-based system for notifying PSAs about transport needs was creating patient hold-ups.

The PSAs had to collect a slip from a central office that explained which patient had to be taken where, and when this had to happen. Next, they had to find the patient, deliver them to the right place, then head back to the same office to wait for another slip to come through. It was an inefficient and slow process, for patients and PSAs.

Austin Health had previously rolled out Microsoft’s Power Platform organisation-wide, giving its IT team access to tools such as Power BI for visualising data and Power Apps for developing bespoke apps. Already, the organisation was using Power BI dashboards to help doctors and nurses visualise and share secure data. Now, it recognised it could also use the Power Platform to streamline the way PSAs worked.

Because staff members had access to a low-code platform, and because they were able to leverage the organisation’s existing digital infrastructure – which includes Dynamics 365 as well as Azure – it took them just three days to build a mobile app for PSAs.

The swift innovation has also paved the way for Austin Health to build more Power Apps that can quickly iron out operational challenges, and so continue to improve patient satisfaction with the hospital experience.

Ensuring next-generation services for next-generation citizens

These stories highlight just how valuable the public sector’s existing digitalisations have been in delivering better citizen services – as well as how much further we can go from here.

 By building on its existing digital infrastructure with powerful, next-generation technologies, our government agencies can further improve the speed and quality of their services to meet growing citizen expectations without putting pressure on their finite resources.