Services Australia

A short post to share a quick work update.

This week I’m joining Services Australia as General Manager, Customer and Staff Digital Programs. The division brings together the teams responsible for digital experience across the agency, including myGov and digital ID.

Back in 2022, I worked on the myGov User Audit, and it has been great to follow the progress since then in making myGov easier, faster and more secure — such as the recent work on passkeys and registering a birth.

I hope to be a good steward to the great teams delivering these critical services for Australia, and to work across government to continue delivering incremental, useful improvements to the digital experience.

I will miss the brilliant team at the Department of Finance, where I’ve been on secondment for the past 18 months.

There are too many highlights to mention them all, but I am particularly proud of the team for landing a refreshed regulatory reform agenda in the 2023-24 MYEFO, delivering the digital statutory declarations capability in myGov, and working on a wide range of AI issues with our colleagues at DISR and the DTA.

Regulatory reform

Now the myGov user audit has wrapped up, I have joined the Regulatory Reform Division at the Australian Government Department of Finance.

I’m leading a new branch focussed on Regulatory Technology and Innovation and working with a great team.

I’m looking forward to working with regulators across government, including state and territories, and our growing RegTech industry in Australia. If this is you, get in touch and let’s have a chat.

myGov audit

Since September, I’ve been working on the “user audit” of myGov. We’re a small team supporting an expert panel, led by David Thodey. It’s a short sharp review: we started in September and we’ll be done and dusted by Christmas.

The audit is not just looking at the current myGov platform - the thing you use to sign into some federal government services. We’re going wider: thinking about the delivery of digital government services, including across jurisdictions. So lots to get stuck into.

You can make a submission to the audit until 10 November. If you use government services, work on government services, or help people use government services, please do.

Here’s the full terms of reference if you fancy a read.

10 years of GOV.UK

It was 10 years today that we launched GOV.UK.

GOV.UK had been running in public beta since January 2012, but 17 October 2012 was the day we removed all the beta messages, switched off Directgov and Business Link, and GOV.UK became the nation’s website.

On launch day, the team gathered in Aviation House around a real-time dashboard of concurrent users, cheering every time we passed another 1000. I think we topped out around 10k concurrents on day 1, a number which has been eclipsed many many times over in recent years.

We had visits from Francis and Martha, and an giant plotter-printed letter of congratulations from Number 10. And cake, obviously.

Over the 10 years since, more than 300 agencies have transitioned to GOV.UK and more than 680 websites closed down. A lot of the technical debt incurred in the early years has been paid down with a more sustainable content platform and publishing tools.

Photo by psd

When I talk with colleagues in Australia about GOV.UK, I am often met with mild derision - along the lines of “GOV.UK just does the content, that’s easy. We’re doing transactions.” To an extent, that’s true. Fixing the content about government services is far simpler than sorting out the technology behind the services themselves.

However, you can’t understate the impact GOV.UK has had on transactions. There are the more visible bits, like the GOV.UK Design System, that means every government transaction looks, feels and behaves like the rest of GOV.UK.

Look deeper and there is an underpinning mental model: GOV.UK is the start and end point of almost all transactions. It’s the home of the Service Manual and the brand of the common platforms like Notify, Pay and Forms. In turn, almost everything that looks like GOV.UK has been through a transformation process - the result of discoveries, alphas and betas, built upon rounds of user research and iteration.

The result is a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ fabric of government information and services, without any single technology platform underpinning the whole. Within this ecosystem, mature digital teams have grown in each government department, all designing and building services that ‘fit’ in GOV.UK.

So, whilst there is lots for us to be proud of in the GOV.UK website, it’s the delivery model it has enabled that I hope will be GOV.UK’s long legacy.

Photo by phae

Springbrook

In September, I had a couple of weeks of leave before starting on the myGov User Audit. We went up to the Gold Coast for a few days, including a day walking up in the hinterland at Springbrook National Park.

Week 123

• For the next couple of weeks, whilst Nick is away on leave, I’m acting in the role of head of division. So this week has been a bit different to usual. So far, I’d say fewer meetings - but more complex issues.

• One of the unique things about our program is that we live inside the regulatory group, not inside IT. Now that we’ve grown considerably, we have been looking at what can be done to bolster the lines of engagement between our digital teams and our regulatory areas.

  There is no exact science to this. Right now, we have a mix of channels in place, depending on the team. For example, some of our product teams have advisory groups formed of representatives from the relevant regulatory areas. Many of our teams work closely with individual subject matter experts. Some (but not all) of our product managers have joined us on loan from regulatory teams.

  We are now looking to go further and create a handful of business lead roles to work all across our program. To support them, some of the branch heads responsible for our core regulatory functions (eg. the team that manages meat exports) will be anointed business stewards.

• On the other hand, we also work very closely with our friends in IT. As our program has grown, so too has the work of our Digital Foundations area building the ‘wholesale’ platforms for the whole department - on which we deliver our ‘retail’ services.

  This new ‘wholesale’/’retail’ operating model poses new questions for how we make decisions about our technology and architecture. Anuj, who leads technology for our program, wrote our initial technology strategy about 18 months ago. It’s simple, straightforward, and pragmatic (and we ought to blog about it).

  To date, our technology decisions have largely joined up - not least because the combined group of people making the decisions has been quite small. However, as we grow, we know that won’t always be the case. So - we are doing some thinking, having some joint conversations (and a bit of paper writing) to look at how we can set this up for the long run.

• This week, I’ve read The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. The book posits that organisational health is the defining trait of high-performing teams, and dives into some of the diagnoses where organisational health is low. An easy read and lots to reflect on from some of the teams I’ve led and worked within.

• Jess and I went up to Sydney for the weekend. I had coffee with Martin and we had a great chat about where next for digital government in Australia - particularly reflecting on Lesley Seebeck’s article last week. We also went for a walk around Marrickville with TJ and Han, dropping into some of the arts and crafts workshops on the trail of the EDGE Sydneham festival.

• Finally, it was absolutely brilliant to run the City2Surf today for the first time since 2019. Not a PB this year, but a good result nonetheless.

Week 122

• Our Guidance and Support team have been working to make it easier to understand the steps involved in exporting agricultural goods. This week, the team showcased a prototype of a new interactive guidance product. It’s a decision tree that, given the circumstances of an export business, shows you specific pieces of relevant content. Next up, we’re looking at what it will take to get the prototype shipped into production.

• On Wednesday evening, it was great to attend the launch of the Innovation Papers, a collection of short essays collated by James and Corrie at InnovationAus.com about the opportunities and challenges in Australia’s technology and innovation ecosystem. It was published as an actual printed newspaper, but there’s also a digital edition you can read online. A couple of the articles I’ve read so far include Lesley Seebeck on digital delivery in government and Ellen Broad on regulating artificial intelligence.

• Later in the week, I travelled up to Sydney to spend time with members of our team. It was great to have coffee and formally welcome Matt O’Neill. Matt has recently joined as a service designer from the City of Sydney and the NSW Government. He’s joined our team connecting the Export Service with the whole-of-government trade agenda led by the Simplified Trade System taskforce.

  I spent Friday in our Sydney office with Felicity, Alzbeta, and Flavius, who are looking at our end-to-end service and future strategy, and with Matti, who leads our Export Intelligence team. It was also great to catch up and brief Jo. Our division head Nick is on leave for the next couple of weeks. I will be holding the fort in his absence, and Jo will be doing the same for our branch.

• Whilst on the road, I dialled into a meeting of the Trade Reform Board on Friday afternoon. The board meets quarterly to oversee the progress of all of our digital and regulatory reform work underway in the Agricultural Trade Group. It’s the most senior governance forum for our program. We briefed the board on our performance for the last quarter and the plans for Quarter 1.

• Reading Cate McLaurin’s week notes, I was pleased to come across the Uncertain Times project. It provides a collection of cards, a workbook, and a daily planner to help deal with uncertain environments and looks a helpful resource for building individual and team resilience.

• There’s been a bit in the news recently about the Uluru Statement from the Heart. To learn more about the statement and its background, I have been reading the book Truth-Telling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement by Henry Reynolds.

Weeks 120 and 121

• On some weeks, there can be plenty to write about in week notes: new product milestones, team achievements, research and events. On the contrary, the reality of the day-to-day running of a branch means there can be plenty of things that are not interesting nor appropriate to write about in week notes. That’s largely been the case for the last fornight, so the notes are rather thin. Sorry.

• I was due to travel to Toowoomba to speak at the ABARES Regional Outlook conference. Alas, lurgy got the better of me and I had a couple of days off work to recover, but back in fine fettle now. I’m grateful to Ruth, Victor, Brigette, and Natalie, who held the fort, gave demonstrations of the Export Service, and signed up a fair few people to participate in our user research activities. And a big thanks to our friends at ABARES for inviting us.

• I’ve read two tremendous books over the last fortnight. The first was The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. It’s a retelling of world history through the lens of the trading routes passing through the centre of the globe. The second was Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, which documents the extraordinary agricultural inventions of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

• In some personal news, I became an Australian Citizen. This month marks 7 years since I first came to Australia to help set up the Digital Transformation Office. It’s great to finally become an Aussie and I look forward to many more years here. 🇦🇺

Week 119

• Here in Canberra, it’s school holidays, so this week quite a few of the team have been away on well-earned breaks.

• Our Registrations and Approvals team are starting work on transforming the last of the four EX26 paper forms left, the EX26d. The EX26d is used for establishments preparing plant products, like horticulture and grain, and it covers a really wide range of circumstances - have a read of the form for yourself (pdf, 480kb).

  It’s also quite unique: currently, you need to attach it to an existing form when you register or change the details of an establishment. We could replicate this approach and built it as a separate transaction, but the user experience of completing two forms would be pretty clunky.

  Instead, we are going to redesign the existing transaction to build it right there into the flow for plant exporters. Our goal is to ship this for new registrations this quarter, and then take on the process for existing establishments next quarter.

• We had a great kick off with the Rules and Requirements team this week. We are starting a discovery into the different places that the rules and requirements for export are published. This involves looking at the experiences of export businesses, but also the experience of our staff who approve permits - and need to check whether the rules have been met.

  We will also be doing a technical assessment of the current version of the Manual of Importing Country Requirements (Micor), which currently sits on an externally-facing SharePoint site, and consider our technology options for the future.

• Our friends in the Trade Reform Division are recruiting for the Future Traceability Hub. If you’re interested in working on the data standards and credentials for our future supply chains, there’s a role open until Wednesday 27 July. A great EL1 opportunity with some lovely people, including Jo and Jasveer.

• It’s always great to see more people in government write week notes. Clare from the Australian Public Service Academy published week notes for the first time this week, including some good podcast recommendations - worth a read.

• I finished reading Heading South by Tim Richards. I started reading it on the flight home from England in April. It’s a lovely jaunt around the railways of Australia, starting in north Queensland and finishing all the way over in Bunbury, WA.

• Jess and I went to Sydney for the weekend. I went to the SCG and watched England trounce the Wallabies - brilliant stuff. 🏉

Week 118

There was a six month break since the last week notes, sorry. Now it’s a new financial year. Let’s start again.

What’s happened over the last few months?

Our team has grown significantly. Across the whole program, we’re now about 350 people across 38 teams.

In the branch, we’ve just set up two new product teams: one team looking at making it easier to understand the rules and requirements for exporting (starting with reimagining the existing Manual of Importing Country Requirements) and another team looking at transforming the digital experience of the National Residue Survey.

The Export Service has grown too. Some of the highlights include:

• Our product to manage export establishments online has now been available in public beta for about 6 months. We have since expanded the service to allow new establishments to be registered online and for existing establishments to be revoked.

• Our product hygiene dashboards for meat processors are also now widely available in public beta, and our new platform for auditors is well progressed in a private beta for plant exporters.

• Our Guidance and Support team have shipped new pages to help users start with the service. You can check them out here.

In the spirit of agile comms we’ve written a few blog posts that have been published to the department’s account on LinkedIn. There is an index of all our blog posts here.

And, of course, our teams have now amassed plenty of mission patches:

What’s happened this week?

• This week was our first week in the new Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF). The main impacts for our team have been to update the brand across the Export Service, and update links to our content that has moved to the DAFF website. The Agriculture Design System has been very helpful here: we were able to update our common header component and then roll it quickly out across all our applications.

• July also marks the start of Quarter 1, and so we held quarterly planning workshops on Monday and Tuesday this week. This included our teams setting out their milestones for Q1 and then working through the dependencies across other teams and our platform.

• It was NAIDOC Week and on Monday I went along to a session hosted by Chris about the Jawun APS Secondment Program. There were some incredible stories shared from DAFF colleagues who had previously taken part in the program, working in an Indigenous community.

• Our Registration and Approvals team shipped the ability for export businesses to apply to revoke their establishment. This replaces another of the EX26 paper forms - just one more now to go.

• Our friends in the Digital Services Division, who look after the cloud infrastructure that we run the Export Service on, had a celebration on Thursday this week to mark the milestone of deploying the first app to the new cloud environment. We are excited passengers on this journey. As we gradually migrate all our apps to the new platform, we will be able to run faster.

• The Quota team are finishing their alpha phase, and presented a great showcase on the needs they’ve identified, the principles in which they’re approaching designing our new quota management capabilities, and some prototypes of the new tools we’re going to build for our staff who administer the quota processes.

• I’ve started using Zotero to organise all the interesting presentations, reports and blog posts on digital government I’ve come across over the last 10 years or so. (They previously lived in Pinboard bookmarks and desktop folders.)