Martin Stewart-Weeks - Are We There Yet?: The Digital Transformation of Government and the Public Service in Australia

THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
OF GOVERNMENT AND THE
PUBLIC SECTOR IN AUSTRALIA

Martin Stewart-Weeks
Simon Cooper

First published 2019

for Martin Stewart-Weeks and Simon Cooper

by

Longueville Media Pty Ltd

PO Box 205 Haberfield NSW 2045 Australia

www.longmedia.com.au

T. +61 410 519 685

Copyright 2019 Simon Cooper and Martin Stewart-Weeks

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing by Siobhan Gallagher, Longueville Media

Cover design by Nina Nielsen, Logueville Media

Printed and bound in Australia.

First published in 2019.

Print ISBN: 978-0-6485107-3-4

eBook ISBN: 978-0-6485107-6-5

So much has been written about the nature of digital transformation over the years that the phrase has started to lose all meaning. No wonder people get confused about it. No wonder so many organisations fail to understand it, and ultimately fail to make it happen.

Its time to cut through the waffle and set it out clearly: digital transformation is the act of radically changing how your organisation works, so that it can survive and thrive in the internet era.

Mike Bracken,
former head of the UKs Government Digital Service

a valuable and very timely addition to Australian thinking and practice about digital transformation in government and the public sector from two reflective practitioners with a lively and relevant mix of theory, strategy, and practical operational experience

Dr Sarah Pearson

Chief Innovation Officer and Chief Scientist, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Ive read a lot about the potential impact of digital technology on public services how it can enhance productivity, improve citizen service, and require new workplace skills. But this is the first book to persuade me that the power of digital, properly conceived, really can transform the nature of democratic governance.

Professor Peter Shergold AC

Chancellor, Western Sydney University, and former Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet

In decades to come, governments will be digital to their core, providing enormous benefits for everyone. Stewart-Weeks and Cooper have used this book to open our eyes to the opportunity and challenges of the transformation ahead. Far from being daunted, we should be excited by the vision that they paint.

Robert Hillard

Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, Deloitte and author of Information-Driven Business: How to Manage Data and Information for Maximum Advantage

This is an unusually thoughtful and wide-ranging book on a subject thats too often treated with shrill hype or hysterical fear. It rightly acknowledges just how revolutionary digital technologies can be. But its also clear that part of their value is to help governments change in ways they should be doing anyway: becoming more open, responsive and problem-solving, and throwing away the stiff hierarchical cultures that long ago lost whatever justifications they may once have had.

Dr Geoff Mulgan

CEO, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), former head of Strategy, UK Cabinet Office and author of Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World and Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government

Are We There Yet? lucidly diagnoses how digital technologies, including artificial intelligence and big data, are transforming the role of the public servant and the project of governance itself. In this timely provocation, Stewart-Weeks and Cooper describe the important shift from power to problem-solving and explain how to harness digital transformation to make government work better for all of us.

Beth Noveck

Author of Wiki Government, former Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House, Professor in Technology, Culture & Society, New York University and Chief Innovation Officer for New Jersey

I find it easy to get excited about the convergence of technologies that presage a fourth industrial revolution. Equally, I find it hard not to become discouraged by the apparent decline of trust in the institutions of democratic governance. And I become increasingly and publicly frustrated by the fact that those two social forces cannot be brought together, the first helping to address the second.

Why is it, I have wondered, that billions of people can stay connected through pervasive mobile devices, access vast amounts of newly created data, be assisted by capable machines and robotic process automation, and yet find it ever harder to talk to each other about how to find solutions to the wicked problems of human existence?

A digital communications technology that seems ideally suited to the creation of more civil and harmonious public discourse and has the potential to allow many more citizens to participate in decision-making, too often seems to hinder rather than help. The instancy of social media too often generates the fake news and creates tribal groupings that can easily give rise to populism, hate and authoritarianism.

Thats why I was pleased to read this unusual book.

Its a book about the digital transformation of government that isnt primarily about digital transformation. Its a book which is willing to address the bigger questions.

Its written by two reflective practitioners whose perspectives and experience are different but complementary. Its a brief history of a story in which half of the plot perhaps the most interesting half is generally missing.

The book starts the exploration of the digital transformation project not with technology but with an exploration of governments underlying theory of the business. It examines some of the big trends and shifts in politics, economics and society which form the context, and create the conditions, for the work of transformation itself.

Its a distinctively Australian story, but its significance can only be understood in a global context of change and innovation. Its a story that in many important ways has no end and is changing almost as fast as the narrative itself. Its a tale fuelled primarily by technologys intense and hectic metabolism.

The book suggests that digital transformation is altering the way government and the public sector develop policy, impose regulation and design and deliver services. The technology is changing both the work of the public sector and the way the public sector works. It has the capacity to measurably lift levels of integrity and legitimacy in the role, purpose and function of government and the public sector.

On the face of it, you could argue there isnt a need for a book like this. After all, there is plenty of evidence that jurisdictions around the world, not the least in Australia, are already busy working on digital transformation agendas of more or less scale, scope and significance. For example: