DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION STRATEGY
2018
The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) developed the Digital Transformation Strategy to set the direction of the Australian Government to become one of the top 3 digital governments in the world. This was one of the first strategies of its kind in the Australian Government, where the DTA’s Service Design and Delivery Process was coupled with agile delivery methods to produce a strategy suitable for everyday Australians to read and understand.
This strategy, as well as the lengthy discovery and consultation process to create it, explored what will need to change by 2025 to ensure government services are centred around users, not government structures. It also sets out a 2 year roadmap of initiatives to ensure strong foundations are in place to evolve from.
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Typically these types of strategies are written in very bureaucratic language, aimed at the senior executives of the Australian Public Service. Rarely are they intended to be read by the general public. The Digital Transformation Strategy however, was written directly to the general public, the ultimate ‘end-user’ of government services. This created interesting and unique challenges for the team throughout the process.
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My role in this project was initially set out as just workshop facilitation and visual design. However, with such a small team and many pivots, I became deeply involved in the entire process. At the beginning of the project I was involved in discovery research activities, during which I spoke to 53 people from 25 government agencies. I used these research interviews to explore how they see their work being supported by such a strategy, what help they might need from the DTA post publishing to ensure initiatives are successfully completed and tested content with them as it was developed. I used the insights from this research to drive the unusual approach to writing this strategy and its associated roadmaps. As the content of the strategy was fleshed out, I moved into the visual designer role, creating the layout, look and feel of the strategy, as well as a user friendly view of the roadmap, that went through several design iterations. ​
The Strategy team more broadly was made up of 6 people including an Enterprise Architect, Delivery Manager, Policy Officers and myself as then Visual and Service Designer. Beyond the team we had an extensive network of very invested stakeholders which included the executive team, the Office of the CEO, executive and Secretaries of other agencies and the responsible Minister. Effectively and efficiently managing these relationships was key to the project, especially as we were taking a very new approach to strategy design. During the course of the project we also had a number of changes within this stakeholder group, including the responsible executive leader, the DTA CEO and the responsible minister, all of which resulted in significant pivots from the product team. Working in an agile way allowed us to respond far more easily to these pivots.
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The success of the process was clear during these pivots as having our work driven by user need and user research meant we were able to have more impactful influence over our new stakeholders as they sought to make their mark on the work. The process used to deliver the strategy is looked at as an example of how a co-design approach can be applied to policy development in a way that delivers ambitious outcomes at a whole-of-government or whole-of-nation level.
